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When was blue first made?
What is the history of the color blue in art?
How long has blue been a color?
Where did Blue come from?
Blue made its first appearance on the art scene 6,000 years ago, with the early extraction of lapis lazuli in Afghanistan. For millennia, the mountains of the northeastern Baluchistan province remained the only source of this treasured and vibrant stone.
- Egyptian Blue. There’s a long list of things we can thank the ancient Egyptians for inventing, and one of them is the color blue. Considered to be the first ever synthetically produced color pigment, Egyptian blue (also known as cuprorivaite) was created around 2,200 B.C.
- Ultramarine. The history of ultramarine began around 6,000 years ago when the vibrant, semi-precious gemstone it was made from—lapis lazuli—began to be imported by the Egyptians from the mountains of Afghanistan.
- Cobalt blue. Cobalt blue dates back to the 8th and 9th centuries, and was then used to color ceramics and jewelry. This was especially the case in China, where it was used in distinctive blue and white patterned porcelain.
- Cerulean. Originally composed of cobalt magnesium stannate, the sky-colored cerulean blue was perfected by Andreas Höpfner in Germany in 1805 by roasting cobalt and tin oxides.
The Egyptians loved the precious stones lapis and turquoise so much that they invented the first synthetic blue pigment in order to affordably copy their unique color. “Egyptian blue” was...
Blue was first used as a gender signifier just prior to World War I (for either girls or boys), and first established as a male gender signifier in the 1940s. Sales was a particular motivation for the gendering of clothing, as well as the invention of prenatal sexing.
- Egyptian Blue. Hippopotame (Hippopotamus) , c. 3800-1700 BC. Musée du Louvre. Permanent collection. Nebamun hunting in the marshes, fragment of a scene from the tomb-chapel of Nebamun, Late 18th Dynasty-around 1350 BC.
- Ultramarine. Sassoferrato. The Virgin in Prayer, 1640-1650. The National Gallery, London. Johannes Vermeer. Girl with a Pearl Earring, ca. 1665. Mauritshuis, The Hague.
- Indigo. Unknown Artist. Basinjom Mask and Gown. Seattle Art Museum. Permanent collection. Tye-dyed cloth (adire oniko) with full moon (osu bamba)
- Prussian Blue. Pablo Picasso. La Célestine (La femme à la taie) (La Celestina), 1904. Musée Picasso Paris. Katsushika Hokusai. Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami ura), also known as the Great Wave, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei), ca.
The true blue of this stone is stunning to almost any eye, and when the Egyptians tried and failed to crush this gem and turn it into paint, the result was a washed-out gray color. It wasn’t successfully turned into a paint until about the 6th century when Buddhist monks in Afghanistan began adding it to their paintings.
Nov 28, 2023 · The Ancient Egyptians created the first blue pigment around 2,200 B.C. They heated a mixture of sand, ground limestone and copper-containing minerals like malachite or azurite at a high temperature. This process created an opaque blue glass that was crushed and combined with a thickening agent to make glaze and paint.
