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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 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.

A dark brown earth pigment of lignite and humus, named for Anthony van Dyck though he probably never used it.

The pale yellow-green of Vaseline glass: uranium oxide melted into silica, fluorescing vivid neon-green under ultraviolet, produced from 1830s Bohemia until wartime requisition of uranium stocks halted civilian production in 1942-43.

The dark indigo wool issued to Federal soldiers in the American Civil War, standardised in 1861 and worn well into the Indian Wars.

Ground lapis lazuli from Afghan mines, once as costly as gold and reserved for the Virgin's robe.