Basic lead chromate, described by Vauquelin in 1809, identified in a Renoir at the National Gallery and seldom recorded in painters' hands.

Mercury iodide, a scarlet brighter than vermilion by George Field's account, sold by Winsor & Newton as Pure Scarlet even after a handbook the firm published said it should have no place on the palette.

A yellow Peter Woulfe made from indigo and nitric acid in 1771, used to dye silk in Lyon by 1847, and packed into artillery shells from the 1880s.

A yellow dye from the inner bark of the American black oak, named and controlled by Edward Bancroft, who also spied for Britain.

An illuminators' blue and purple from the fruit of Chrozophora tinctoria, stored on dyed rags, whose colouring molecule was identified only in 2020.

Gold precipitated with tin into a purple that survives the kiln, used in glass and enamels long before its colloidal nature was recognised.

An iron phosphate that comes out of the ground colourless, turns blue in air, and in old paintings can go on to yellow or brown.

Sven Rinman's cobalt-zinc green of 1780, permanent in sun and air and faulted in later editions of Field's Chromatography for lacking body and power.

Massicot now means yellow lead monoxide, but the old northern painting manuals mostly used the name for lead-tin yellow.

The saturated orange-red of Homer Laughlin's Fiestaware dinner plate, glazed with uranium oxide at up to fourteen percent by weight, produced from 1936 until the Manhattan Project commandeered the supply and revived briefly with depleted uranium until around 1973.

The deep cobalt-blue stained glass of Chartres Cathedral, surrounded by a 'lost recipe' legend that the documentary record contradicts.

Stuart Semple's daylight-fluorescent pink, sold under a click-through that buyers must not be, or be acting on behalf of, Anish Kapoor.

A fermented unripe-persimmon tannin dye used in Japan since the Heian period for paper, cloth, and fishing nets. Unusual among natural colourants for deepening with light rather than fading.

A cooler, less toxic alternative to lead white, sold by Winsor & Newton as 'Chinese white' for watercolour from 1834.

The yellow earth used at Lascaux and Chauvet, still mined commercially at Roussillon in the south of France.

Europe's homegrown blue, the colour Caesar said the Britons stained themselves with, grown as a major crop from the twelfth century until cheaper Indian indigo destroyed the trade.

The premier yellow dye of medieval Europe, mixed with woad to produce the Lincoln green Robin Hood is traditionally said to have worn.

The pale blue of Josiah Wedgwood's 1775 jasperware, calibrated to make neoclassical white reliefs look like miniature Greek temples.

An ink made from boiled walnut husks, used by Renaissance draughtsmen for sepia-toned underdrawings and still beloved of artisanal stationers.

A hydrated chromium-oxide green, first made around 1838 and given a cheaper industrial process by Guignet in 1859, that gave the Impressionists a stable green with no arsenic in it.

A cool blue-black made by charring grapevines in sealed pots, recommended by Pliny and still produced today for traditional oil painting.

A triarylmethane dye named for the queen during her diamond-jubilee decade, used for ink, paper and the silk linings of imperial gifts.

A French commercial name for the mixed-pigment greens made from chrome yellow and Prussian blue, attested in French sources from at least the late 18th century and widely used in 19th-century decorative and industrial trades.

A bright earth green named after the painter Paolo Veronese, whose vast Venetian canvases were lit by exactly this cool, dry hue.

Mercury-sulphide red prized from Pompeii to China, and dug at Almadén in Spain by convicts and slaves.

The blue-green crust scraped from copper plates doused in vinegar, used by medieval manuscript painters despite its habit of damaging the paper under it.

A reddish-brown iron-oxide red, used as a natural earth in Titian's paintings and made as a separate, manufactured pigment from the 18th century onward.

The finer grade of parchment, made from calfskin, used for manuscripts such as the Book of Kells and, since 2015, for the covers of the record copies of British public Acts.

The deep purple of Catholic mourning vestments and cardinal under-robes, originally Tyrian and later imitated with cochineal and indigo.

A forest of carbon nanotubes that absorbs 99.965% of light, controversially licensed exclusively to artist Anish Kapoor.