One of the most striking works in the oeuvre of the famous French Impressionist Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) is a painting of a landscape with farmers. Not because of its subject matter, but because Pissarro painted this picture on one of his palettes (fig. 1). It is a telling example by an internationally renowned artist of a phenomenon that occurred throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, albeit mostly unnoticed by critics and art historians. Admittedly, Pissarro's work clearly stands out when compared to the average palette- with-picture from the period. When looked at from an aesthetic point of view, these works very often hardly seem to deserve any attention at all. What gives them special interest, however, is the fact that these little artworks use the palette as their support. They are artworks painted on — and thereby literally shaped by — a tool that embodies the act of painting itself. This essay aims to provide insight into the position and meaning of this phenomenon in nineteenth-century Dutch painting.

MIXING PAINT

The simple answer to the question why painters as diverse as Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch, Carel Storm van ‘s-Gravesande, Louis Apol or Henriette Ronner-Knip all produced painted palettes in the second half of the nineteenth century would be that earlier painters simply could not have done so, due to their very different working methods. For artists up until the mid-nineteenth century, making paint and mixing color was a time-consuming and expensive business, carried out in the painter's workshop. Artists therefore used only a limited range of colors at any one time — different “palettes,” so to speak — which were selected especially for the part of the painting they were working on. It is therefore highly unlikely that they could have created the type of painted palette discussed here, as they would never have had all the colors necessary available on their palette for a full painting.

Pissarro's palette still exhibits the colors he used for building up his landscape.