100 Orange Artworks

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Today I give you artworks that feature the Thanksgiving-ish color orange. My intention was to post a few, but once I started to collect a few, I saw orange in artworks everywhere! As this post grew, my shifting goals for organization and style became increasingly more difficult to manage, so pictures and text are not in any particular order of history. Factual orange seeds are interspersed, and perhaps are fruitful as an aid for rerouting more frighteningly primary issues such as red white and blue on this day.

If you have an orange painting that you’d like to share, I hope you will post it to our Facebook page. I’d love to see. Thank you, and enjoy!

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Orange and the ancient world

Ancient Egyptian artists used an orange mineral pigment called realgar for tomb paintings. This soft, sectile mineral occurs in monoclinic crystals, which can form into large clusters of scarlet, semi-precious gemstones. The same pigment was later used for coloring manuscripts by medieval artists.

Orange pigments were also made in ancient times from a mineral known as orpiment, whose naturally golden-yellow hue made it of great interest to alchemists; they conjectured it held the secret to forming gold. Orpiment was traded in the Roman Empire and was used as medicine in China despite its high arsenic content.

For centuries, orpiment was ground down and used as pigment in painting and sealing wax. In fact, it was one of the few clear, bright pigments available to artists until the 19th century, whose dawn saw the introduction of cadmium yellows, chromium yellows and organic dye-based colors. After the 19th century, orpiment became redundant because of its extreme toxicity and incompatibility with other common pigments, such as verdigris and azurite. (Source: artsandcollections)

Etymology

Before the 15th century, the color orange did not have a name in Europe; it was simply called yellow-red. Portuguese merchants brought the first orange trees to Europe from Asia in the late 15th and early 16th century, along with the Sanskrit, naranga—which became ‘naranja’ in Spanish and ‘laranja’ in Portuguese.

In English, the word ‘orange’ stems from the Old French and Anglo-Saxon orenge. The earliest recorded use of the word in English is from the 13th century and alludes to the fruit. In reference to the color, however, its earliest attested use is from the 16th century. (Source: Artsandcollections)

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Let’s go for a moment to New York in the early 1950s. Frank O’Hara wrote about visiting the studio of his friend, the painter Michael Goldberg, and about how their processes differed, in the poem Why I am not a Painter. In the poem, Goldberg inserts the word ‘Sardines’ into his painting, then excises it; the finished painting is called Sardines. O’Hara, meanwhile, writes:

One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life.

In the poem O’Hara keeps writing until a suite of poems titled Oranges emerges, with no mention of the color itself. Instead his friend, the painter Grace Hartigan made 12 paintings illustrating O’Hara’s Oranges and incorporating its text, in which the color allows her to explore questions of her own identity: as in O’Hara’s poem, here orange in the abstract becomes an open window into the self and how our actions relate to our identity. (Souce: Anothermag)

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Moldy Oranges

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18th and 19th century

In 1797, French scientist Louis Vauquelin discovered the mineral crocoite, which led in 1809 to the advent of the synthetic pigment chrome orange. Other synthetic pigments, cobalt red, cobalt yellow and cobalt orange, made from cadmium sulphide plus cadmium selenite, soon followed. These new pigments, plus the invention of the metal paint tube in 1841, meant artists could paint outdoors and capture the colors of natural light.

Pomona (pictured above in a painting by Nicolas Fouché c.1700), the goddess of fruitful abundance, was often depicted in orange; her name derived from the Latin word pomon, meaning fruit. Thanks to the 17th century invention of the heated greenhouse, oranges themselves became more common in northern Europe.

Much of 20th-century painting’s development relied on synthetic paint colors invented during the previous century. After the color theory work of English chemist George Field, who developed vivid synthetic pigments, painters including the Pre-Raphaelites were able to embrace orange in their work for the first time. Below: Frederic Leighton’s portrait Flaming June, in which a young woman in an apricot gown is asleep under an oleander plant. (Souce: Anothermag)

In England orange became very popular with the Pre-Raphaelites, a group of English painters, poets and critics, founded in 1848. The flowing red-orange hair of Elizabeth Siddal, the wife of painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, became a symbol of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Albert Joseph Moore painted festive scenes of Romans wearing bright orange cloaks brighter than any Roman would have worn.

Orange became an important color for all the impressionist painters. Having studied recent books on color theory, they knew orange placed next to azure blue made both colors appear much brighter. Auguste Renoir painted boats with stripes of chrome orange straight from the paint tube.

The post-impressionists went further with orange. Paul Gauguin used orange as backgrounds, for clothing and skin color, to fill his paintings with light and exoticism.

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But Vincent Van Gogh was perhaps the most prolific user of the color. Orange and yellow represented for Van Gogh the pure sunlight of Provence. He created his own oranges with mixtures of yellow, ochre and red. He put an orange moon and stars in a cobalt sky.

Still Lives, with Orange

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Orange Katz

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Orange Egon

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Scribbles, Lines, & Patterns

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Trees and Buildings

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Saffron Ladies

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The Forest

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Stories in Orange

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Abstractions

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Again, I invite you to add to our orange album on our Facebook page. Thank you, and enjoy you day!