Verdigris

What color is verdigris?

The story of verdigris

Verdigris is the green you get when you leave copper in vinegar, and for a thousand years it was the brightest green in Europe.

The name is the recipe. Vert de grez, in old French, is green made by acid, though it drifted toward vert de Grece, green of Greece, since so much of it came from there. Medieval workshops sealed copper strips to a block with vinegar and buried it in dung for a few weeks; the French used wine. Around Montpellier, women stacked copper plates in clay pots with grape pomace in their cellars and scraped off the crystals as they ripened, and the chemist Nicolas Lemery wrote the recipe down in 1675. By the 1710s the state was policing the fraud, eight tenths of the crop went abroad through licensed women brokers, and the trade lasted into the 1900s.

It is on the walls of Pompeii. Monks put it in manuscripts from the 400s, Giotto used it in the Last Supper of 1306, and Raphael painted Saint John's green coat with it in the Mond Crucifixion of 1502 to 1503. Nothing else gave a clean, transparent green; glazed over lead white or lead-tin yellow it had a depth blue plus yellow could not touch. Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait of 1434 has the most famous green dress in Western painting, so bright it was a statement about money, and the green in it is copper.

Then it turned on everyone. Verdigris shifts color in its first month in the air and browns as it ages, and copper resinate, verdigris boiled in resin for a richer glaze, turns to brown copper oxide in light. Foliage in Veronese's Allegory of Love of 1570 has gone brown that way; Botticelli's angels in the Mystical Nativity of 1500 wore blue-green and now wear dark green. Leonardo told painters to avoid it. Modern research says the panic was overdone, but one charge sticks: it eats paper. Acid left in the pigment breaks down cellulose, and there are Indian miniatures where a verdigris ground has quietly rotted the sheet under it.

The 1800s finished it. Emerald green arrived, arsenic and all, then viridian and chrome green, and verdigris slid off the palette. What survived was the word. The Statue of Liberty was dedicated in 1886 the color of a new penny; shortly after 1900 the green began to spread, by 1906 it covered her, and Congress voted money to paint her over until the public and the Army engineers pointed out that the patina was protecting the copper. That green, on every copper roof and church dome, is what most people mean by verdigris now. Chemically it is copper sulfates and carbonates, not the acetate in the paint, but nobody asks a roof for its formula.

Here is what I take from it. The best green of the Renaissance was a kitchen accident, copper plus sour wine, and it was beautiful precisely because it was unstable. I do not want it in my palette. I do want the color, the cool, slightly milky blue-green of a weathered roof, and that I can mix in ten seconds.

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 verdigris

You cannot buy the real thing, so you mix the color, which is easier than the history. Verdigris sits between blue and green, so start with a green-leaning blue and pull it toward green with a cool green rather than a yellow. The pairing that matters is verdigris and a red-brown, the color of copper before the weather gets to it. A touch of burnt sienna or Venetian Red gives you the dirty warmth of an old roof, bright green over brown metal.

Keep it pale. The web value is a clean turquoise; the patina people picture is chalkier and grayer, and a whisper of white gets you there faster than more green.

Using verdigris in watercolor

Use it for anything copper that has been outdoors a long time: domes, gutters, weathered statues, the roof of a town hall. It is also the right green for the shallow water just off a beach.

My favorite way to lay it down is wet-on-wet with a surprise in it. Wash the verdigris over the shape of a dome, and while it is still shining drop a little Venetian Red along the seams. It blooms into rust streaks exactly the way water stains run down real copper. Let it dry untouched.

It pairs with warm browns and quiet grays: burnt sienna, Payne's gray and a pale yellow ochre all make it look older and more believable.

One thing I learned the hard way: too much green and it becomes a swimming pool. When verdigris reads as tropical rather than old, gray it with a speck of red-brown, never more blue. And take comfort from the history: whatever you mix today will not eat your paper.

Verdigris vs malachite (and emerald green)

Malachite is the nearest thing to it and the opposite in temperament. Both are copper greens, but malachite is a stone, dug and ground, opaque and coarse, a deep green with a blue cast that stays put. Verdigris is made in a pot, transparent, bluer, and it browns. Malachite was for precious patches in a manuscript; verdigris was for the coats and the landscapes.

Emerald green is the one that killed it. Copper again, married to arsenic, it appeared in 1814 as a brilliant green that was poisonous enough to double as a pesticide. Painters took it anyway; verdigris was gone within a generation.

If verdigris is a copper roof after a hundred winters, malachite is the rock the copper came out of, and emerald green is what happened when the chemists got involved.

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.