Scientifically Investigating Picasso's Suspected Use of Ripolin House Paints inStill Life, 1922 andThe Red Armchair, 1931

Abstract

 National Gallery of Art  Independent conservation scientist Ripolin -a popular French house paint -was used extensively by Pablo Picasso and some of his contemporaries. Its presence in particular artworks, however, has been difficult to confirm scientifically due to the chemical similarities between Ripolin and contemporary artist's tube paints, and the lack of knowledge about Ripolin paint formulations. This study compares data collected from a large reference set of historical samples of Ripolin and artist's tube paints with new analytical results from two Picasso paintings in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago suspected to contain Ripolin: Still Life () and The Red Armchair (). A variety of non-invasive and micro-invasive analytical techniques, including x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, fiber-optics reflectance spectroscopy ( to  nm), Raman spectroscopy, optical and polarized light microscopy, and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) with energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy, were used to analyze the paint samples. The results indicate that Still Life does not contain Ripolin, as it has pigments, such as vermilion and lead white, and extenders, such as barium sulfate, not used in French Ripolin house paints. On the other hand, The Red Armchair has paints matching closely with samples of Ripolin Blanc de neige, used alone and mixed with artist's tube colors.

Picasso’s 1917 paint materials and their influence on the condition of four paintings

“…Finally, the blue pigments analysed were also mixtures of pigments where ultramarine was the main blue identified. The identified pigments matched those found in other Picasso paintings studied from the same time period [39,[42][43][44]. The four paintings were in a cubist style, with uniform areas of colour.…”

“…An explanation for the presence of this compound has not yet been determined: phthalic acid is indeed a very common environmental contaminant and not necessarily a paint constituent, but its significant presence could be related to the use of an alkyd-based compound. However, this needs further research as alkyd paints were introduced into the art market only later in the 1930s [36][37][38][39][40].…”

Pablo Picasso to Jasper Johns: a Raman study of cobalt‐based synthetic inorganic pigments

“…The softened impasto appearance of certain passages, including areas of the purple background led to the investigation of the hypothesis that Picasso mixed artists' tube oil colors with a fluid, non‐artists' white paint, such as Ripolin – a popular brand of French house paint . Although the specific use of Ripolin paints in the Red Armchair is discussed in detail elsewhere, this work deals with the issue of precisely identifying the colorants in the purple areas of the painting, in order to evaluate whether they are characteristic of tube paints or non‐artists' paints.…”

Examination of historical paintings by state-of-the-art hyperspectral imaging methods: from scanning infra-red spectroscopy to computed X-ray laminography

“…) range [37][38][39][40][41]. The system incorporates a scan mirror, an imaging lens, a transmission grating spectrometer + relay lens and a cryo-cooled (640 × 512 pixel) InSb sensor.…”