Van Dyke Brown

What color is Van Dyke brown?

The story of Van Dyke brown

Van Dyke brown is a brown made from coal, named after a man who is not known to have used it.

The coal is lignite, the soft brown kind barely past being peat, and the pigment is the humic matter in it: plant material half rotted into acids, with some iron oxide and a little bitumen. It was dug first around Cologne and later around Kassel, which spelled itself Cassel until 1926, and sold as Cologne earth or Cassel earth. The first traces of it are late sixteenth century. In 1764 Robert Dossie in London called it a dark blackish brown, a little inclining toward purple, whose principal use was as a watercolor. Sounds like my kind of paint.

Anthony van Dyck came into it late, and through England. Born in Antwerp in 1599, he was Rubens's chief assistant before he was twenty, and in 1632 became court painter to Charles I in London, where he was knighted and anglicized himself to Vandyke. Writers of the 1790s began calling Cassel earth Vandyke brown because, they said, he had held it in high esteem. There is no evidence he did. It has not been found in any technical analysis of his paintings, and it predates him, so he was not the first to use it either. The name stuck anyway, along with his beard.

Peat, though, is not permanent. Since the 1800s every writer on pigments has worried about Van Dyke brown fading, and the modern verdict is poor to medium lightfastness: fine indoors, fading in sunlight, and going quite distinctly when mixed with white. In oil it is also a poor drier, so it was used as a thin glaze rather than a body color. The Doerner Institute in Munich has found it in sixty-one paintings, most from the 1800s, and Bob Ross used it for trees and cabins.

What you buy today is almost never the coal. Most makers replace the humic earth with a mixture that copies the color and behaves: a black with an iron oxide, or an umber or burnt sienna with black. The label tells you which you have. If it says NBr8, it is the genuine earth; treat it as fugitive. If it lists PBr7 and PBk9, or an iron oxide and a black, it is a permanent imitation. The genuine earth is still made, mostly for wood stains, which tells you what it does best: soak in and age a surface.

Here is my take. Van Dyke brown is a glaze, and it should be bought and used as one. Thin, over a dry passage, it deepens hair, wood and the inside of a doorway without turning them to mud, because it is transparent and leans cool. I keep a mixed version, not the coal, and use it for the last ten percent of a painting: the shadow under a chin, the grain of a table.

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 Van Dyke brown

You can mix Van Dyke brown from any palette with a brown and a black in it; most tubes are exactly that. Burnt sienna with a touch of Ivory Black lands close and pulls warm; burnt umber with black lands closer and cooler. A speck of violet gives the purplish cast the old writers noticed.

Blue is the pairing that matters. With cobalt blue it makes a soft, transparent gray-violet for shadows on white walls and snow; with ultramarine it goes nearly black while staying see-through.

Using Van Dyke brown in watercolor

Use it last. Van Dyke brown is a finishing color: a thin glaze over a dry painting to push a passage back, to darken hair without making it black. Never use it as a first wash, where it looks like weak coffee.

Glazing is the technique. Let the painting dry completely, load a soft brush with a watery mix, and float it over the area in one pass. The layer underneath shows through and the value drops. I do this to almost every portrait, under the jaw and in the hair.

It pairs with blue for shadows and with yellow ochre for warm, transparent browns, the way Doerner said Rubens used it.

One thing I learned the hard way: if the tube says NBr8, keep it out of the sun and out of your whites. A genuine wash in a sketchbook that lived on a windowsill lost two shades in a summer.

Van Dyke brown vs burnt umber (and sepia)

Burnt umber is a rock and Van Dyke brown is a plant. Umber is iron and manganese oxide from a pit in Cyprus; heat it and it only gets browner. Heat genuine Van Dyke brown and it smells of peat and burns to ash. On paper, umber is warmer, more opaque and permanent; Van Dyke brown is cooler, more transparent and, in its genuine form, fugitive.

Sepia is the other dark brown people confuse it with, and today both are usually mixtures of an earth and a black. Sepia is the warmer and more solid of the two, closer to black coffee; Van Dyke brown is thinner and leans toward purple, like strong tea left in the pot overnight.

If burnt umber is a plowed field, sepia is the same field at dusk, and Van Dyke brown is the peat bog next to it.

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.