The Traditional Wooden Palette

Vermeer used  a wood palette like every painter of his time. In the 1676 death inventory of Vermeer's house in the front room of the first floor of the Oude Langendijk, there were listed  "twee schilders eesels, drye paletten", two painters easels, three palettes". In Vermeer's time the familiar painter's palette with a hole for the thumb had replaced the older rectangular kind with a handle. The artist held the palette with his thumb inserted into the hole leaving the rest of his fingers free to comfortably hold a number of brushes and the mahlstick on which he steadied his hand.

this works shows the typical palette used by Dutch painters of the 17th. c

Pictura (An Allegory of Painting)
Frans van Mieris
1661
oil on copper
private collection

Palettes that appear in contemporary painting are surprisingly small in dimension and the   relatively few pigments placed on them in an orderly fashion indicate that artists generally worked on one restricted area of a painting each day. There are various reasons for this procedure. Pigments available to the artist were not so mutually compatible as they are today. Also, they did not have tubes which preserve paints from dry out quickly. Since it was a relatively long and laborious task to produce the necessary quantity of paint each day, large amounts of costly material would have to be thrown away unused if the complete range of pigments were to be available.

Wood was preferred because it was lightweight, rigid but could be shaped easily. Another advantage of wood was its warm brown tone. Many painters started their work on a canvas primed with a warm brownish tone that was not dissimilar to the color of the palette. Since the perception colors are strongly influenced by the dominating tone that surrounds them, the paint that was mixed on the palette did not change perceptibly when applied to the canvas.

In a painting (left) by Vermeer's contemporary Frans van Mieris, the allegorical figure representing Pictura can be seen holding a typical palette. Van Mieris' represented the palette necessary for painting flesh tones. The layout of the pigments, from light to dark, was common. From top to bottom, one can clearly distinguish white lead, the principle component of the lighter flesh tones, then yellow ocher, perhaps madder lake and a series of darker earth tones.

The representation of the flesh palette, which appeared frequently, had a particular significance. Willem Beur, a Dutch painter an author of a manual for painters, wrote: "Just as we humans consider ourselves the foremost amongst animals; so too, are we the foremost subject of the art of paintings, and it is in painting human flesh that its highest achievement are to be seen, whenever a painter succeeds in rendering the diversity of colors and string hues found in human flesh and particularly in the faces, adequately depicting the intricacy of the diversity of people or their different emotions."