We take house paint for granted as a way to decorate our homes and protect surfaces against drying, rot, and the elements. But this unassuming product does in fact have a long and interesting history which cannot be easily summarized. A brief history, however, is better than no history at all. In that spirit, we present a few snapshots of house paint’s evolution in order to heighten your appreciation of it, and to provide some perspective on humans’ need to secure and beautify their dwelling places.
40,000 thousand years ago, cave inhabitants combined various substances with animal fat to make paint, which they used to add pictures and colors to the walls of their crude homes. Hematite, manganese oxide, red and yellow ochre, and charcoal were used as “paint”. Ancient Egyptian painters mixed an oil or fat base with color elements like semiprecious stones, ground glass, earth, animal blood, or lead around 3150 B.C. These ancient peoples preferred black, white, red, blue, green, and yellow. In England, around the turn of the 14th century, house painters started guilds that established standards for their profession and kept trade secrets secret. By the 17th century, new practices and technologies were shaking up the world of house paint even more.
In this time of constantly documented celebrity misconduct, some may not even remember what modesty was. In the 17th century, the Pilgrims, who populated the American colonies, believed that modesty was the avoidance of all displays of wealth, joy, or vanity. Even painting your home was deemed very immodest and highly sacrilegious. In 1630, a Charlestown preacher ran afoul of the growing society’s mores by decorating his home’s interior with paint; he was brought up on criminal charges of sacrilege.
Even colonial Puritanism, however, failed to silence the demand for house paint. Anonymous authors wrote “cookbooks” that offered recipes for various kinds and colors of paint. One oft-used process, called the “Dutch method,” mixed ground oyster shells and lime which made a white wash; iron or copper oxide for red or green color, respectively could then be added to the mix. These Colonial paint “cooks” often used food items like egg whites, milk, rice, and coffee.
From the 17th century until the 19th, oil and water were the primary bases for paint production. Each held certain colors better than others, and there were differences in cost and durability between them, too. Water-based paints were used for ceilings and plaster walls, and oils were used for joinery. Some homeowners wanted walls that looked like wood, marble, or bronze and ceilings that resembled a blue sky with puffy white clouds. Painters of the time routinely fulfilled such requests, which seem fairly eccentric by today’s standards. In 1638, a historic home known as Ham House, located in Surrey, England, was renovated. Renovating the home was a multiple-step process, involving the usage of primer, a couple of undercoats, and a finishing coat of paint to show paneling and cornices in the home. During this time period in paint’s evolutionary history, oil and pigment were hand-mixed to make a stiff paste, which is still done to this day. Well-ground pigment tends to disperse almost completely in oil. Before the 18th century, hand-grinding often exposed painters to an excess of white-lead powder, which could bring about lead poisoning. Despite its toxicity, lead paint was popular at the time due to its durability, which remains difficult to equal. Fortunately, painters eventually added air extraction systems to their workshops, thus reducing the health risks of grinding lead-based pigment. Not until 1978 did the U.S. finally ban the sale of lead house paint.
During the 1700s, paint production underwent a transformation. The first American paint mill opened in 1700 in Boston, Mass. In 1718, the Englishman Marshall Smith devised a “Machine or Engine for the Grinding of Colours,” which prompted a sort of arms race with regard to grinding pigment efficiently. In 1741, the English company Emerton and Manby publicized the “Horse-Mills” that it used to grind its pigment, thus allowing them to sell paint at unbeatable prices. Owner Elizabeth Emerton bragged: “One Pound of Colour ground in a Horse-Mill will paint twelve Yards of Work, whereas Colour ground any other Way, will not do half that Quantity.”
The turn of the 19th century brought about the reign of steam power. Paint mills were no exception; at this point in time, most of them ran on steam. Another, more significant improvement also occurred around this time: Nontoxic zinc oxide became a viable base for white pigment, thanks to European ingenuity it came to the US in 1855.
By the end of the 1800s, roller mills had started to grind pigment as well as grain, and the guild system that had organized English house painters for centuries became a network of trade unions. Mass production of paint was once only a dream, but the production of linseed oil, a cheap binding agent that protected wood as well, made that dream come true.
It was in the 19th century that decorating a home with paint became the norm rather than an outlier. Paint did, after all, make surfaces easily washable and sealed in wood’s natural oils; in doing so, it kept walls from being too wet or too dry.
In 1866, a future titan of the paint business, Sherwin-Williams Paint, was born. Sherwin Williams was the first manufacturer of ready-to-use paint, and its original product, raw umber in oil, came onto the market in 1873. Soon after that, cofounder Henry Sherwin developed a resealable tin can.
Benjamin Moore, one of Sherwin Williams top competitors, was born in 1883. Twenty-four years passed, and the company created a research department headed up by one chemist. Since then, Benjamin Moore Paint has contributed a great deal to paint technology, but the company’s color-matching system, unveiled in 1982 and entirely computer-based, is still considered by many to be its most noteworthy achievement in the 21st century, paint remains a formidable moneymaker; roughly $20.9 billion of the stuff was sold in 2006 alone.
House paint is most often applied to the surface of a residence, but artists have also used it on their canvases. American painter John Frost, who began his career as an artist in 1919, used house paint to chronicle the history of his hometown, the tiny village of Marblehead, Mass. Picasso and many of his contemporaries used it as well. Even contemporary artists, like Nik Ehm, use house paint on occasion.
In the middle of the 20th century, necessity became the mother of invention for the increasingly innovative paint industry. World War II led to a dearth of linseed oil, so chemists combined alcohols and acids to make alkyds, artificial resins that could substitute for natural oil.
Most house paint today is acrylic, or water-based, paint; however, milk paint, which reached the height of its popularity in the 19th century for its unassuming hues, is cropping up again thanks to the environmental movement.
seattle paint dealer has origins dating to the industrial revolution.
To be specific, milk paint doesn’t contain volatile organic compounds, commonly known as VOCs. Latex paint, however, does contain VOCs, making them potentially dangerous to pets and humans. Extended exposure to VOCs can lead to organ or nerve damage, and some may be carcinogenic. Luckily, many paint companies produce low- or even zero-VOC paints. The term “zero-VOC,” by EPA standards, means that each liter of paint contains fewer than 5 grams of volatile compounds. Other non-VOC alternates are clay and water-based paints. If you suffer from allergies, you must used low-VOC paint. In fact, they offer practical advantages no matter what your circumstances, since their lack of strong odor lets you occupy freshly painted rooms relatively soon.
While paint is seemingly simplistic, it has evolved over the centuries to our financial, health, and aesthetic needs. That something so basic can allow us to express ourselves so strikingly, and elevate our mood so effectively, is almost a miracle. The next time you open a can of paint, consider how far through time it’s traveled to add a little beauty to your life.
Tagged house painting, interior design