Naples Yellow

What color is Naples yellow?

The story of Naples yellow

Naples yellow is named after a city it did not come from and a volcano that never made it.

Chemically it is lead antimonate, and with Egyptian blue it is one of the oldest synthetic pigments there is. Egyptian glassmakers were using it by the sixteenth to fourteenth centuries BC, and from about 1500 BC it was the only yellow colorant and opacifier in general use in Egyptian and Mesopotamian glass and glazes. Making it meant first making lead oxide and antimony oxide, which is not something you stumble into. Somebody in a workshop 3,500 years ago knew exactly what they were doing.

Then it went missing. Lead-tin yellows replaced it in glass by the fourth century, and it does not reappear until Italian potters took it up for maiolica at the start of the 1500s. Nobody called it Naples yellow until Andrea Pozzo wrote luteolum napolitanum in a treatise on fresco published in Rome between 1693 and 1700, and the English name first appeared in print in 1738. Writers assumed it was a mineral from Naples or the slopes of Vesuvius, and only in the late 1700s was it generally accepted as a furnace product.

Its great century ran from about 1750 to 1850. Mengs, Goya, David, Ingres and Delacroix all had it on the palette, and later Cezanne. The furnace decided the shade: fired hotter it came out lemon, cooler it came out orange. It could darken in damp air and discolor on contact with iron, so writers told painters to mix it with an ivory or horn knife, never steel. And it was lead and antimony, both poisons. Chrome yellow arrived after 1800, then cadmium, and by mid-century most makers had stopped producing the real thing.

Almost every Naples yellow on sale today is a mixture. Makers build it from titanium white or zinc white with an ochre or another yellow and a touch of red, and sell a light version, nearly cream, and a deep version, closer to apricot. It has no lead in it. What it keeps from the original is the temperament: opaque, soft, a little chalky, the color of butter and of a plastered wall in afternoon sun.

Here is the thing about a color you can mix in ten seconds: buy it anyway if you paint people every week. Naples yellow is the yellow that does not shout. Mix it yourself and a face painted over three sittings will have three different lights on it; the tube is consistency in a lid.

Pigment facts

These describe the pigment in general. Every brand's tube behaves a little differently, so test yours on scrap paper.

How to mix Naples yellow

Mixing Naples yellow is the easiest job on this site: white with a yellow, then the smallest touch of red until the mix stops looking like lemon curd and starts looking like butter. Titanium white gives the right chalky body; yellow ochre with white gets you the deep version in one step.

Red earth is the pairing that matters. Naples yellow with a touch of Venetian red is the basic skin tone in half the portraits you have ever liked: light side straight, shadow side with more red and a whisper of blue. Beside cadmium yellow it makes the cadmium look like sunlight.

Using Naples yellow in watercolor

Use it for light, not for yellow things. A lemon wants cadmium; a wall the sun is hitting wants Naples yellow, and so does the lit side of every face in a room.

Body color is the technique. Because it is opaque, it sits on top of a dry wash, which is how you rescue a highlight on a cheek or a sunlit edge on a wall that went too dark. Use it thick, with barely enough water to move it.

Pair it with the earths and the dull colors: Venetian red for skin, yellow ochre for sand, cobalt blue for the shadows on anything white. Keep it away from cadmium red unless you want it to look gray.

One thing I learned the hard way: never use it as a glaze. A thin Naples yellow over a finished sky gives you a milky veil that no scrubbing removes. Glaze with a transparent yellow and save Naples for the top.

Naples yellow vs yellow ochre (and cadmium yellow)

Yellow ochre is the nearest neighbor and half the recipe. Both are opaque, and both belong in a portrait. Ochre is darker and browner, an earth with grit in it; Naples yellow is paler, pinker and creamier. Side by side, ochre looks like the ground and Naples yellow like light landing on it.

Cadmium yellow is the opposite animal: a saturated, hot, primary yellow with enormous tinting strength. A speck of it moves a whole mix; a speck of Naples yellow does almost nothing. Cadmium is for the lemon and the raincoat. Naples is for the wall behind them.

If cadmium yellow is the sun, Naples yellow is the wall it lands on, and yellow ochre is the path at the bottom of the wall.

More color stories

Mel, founder of Tobio'sI make portable watercolor kits and I named the company after my cat. I write these pages for the beginner I used to be, one pigment at a time.