The history of colour, and its extraction from plant roots and insects to semi-precious stones, is the subject of a new exhibition at the National Gallery.

Making Colour traces how artists in the West, from the Middle Ages to the end of the 19th century, obtained and developed their palettes.

Billed as the first exhibition of its kind in the UK, visitors to the show, which opened yesterday, will walk through a series of colour-themed rooms.

The blue room tells how ultramarine, which was once more expensive than gold, has been made by grinding the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli, mined in a remote part of Afghanistan.

But the deep blue colour was not within the reach of all painters until the 19th century, when an artificial form, French Ultramarine, was developed.

The exhibition describes how artists mixed yellow and red to create orange because the pure orange pigment was difficult to find and the orange mineral realgar, used in many of Titian’s paintings, is poisonous.

The red room shows the creation of the colour from the root of a plant, which was used in ancient Egypt.

Stronger reds were extracted from the bodies of insects.

The purple room tells how the colour has been favoured by nobility and luxury since antiquity, with the Romans extracting a costly dye from shellfish, and how the Victorians developed a passion for purple.

The gold and silver room shows how the colours were used to embellish many religious works.

The exhibition features the gallery’s own paintings and works loaned from other museums as well as textiles, ceramics and glass.

The National Gallery’s director of collections Ashok Roy said: “By exploring the materials that make up the array of artists’ pigments, we can begin to comprehend some of the historic circumstances and difficulties in creating colours that we now take for granted.

“The inclusion of objects such as early textiles, mineral samples and ceramics ensures an enticing display that provides a new angle from which to approach familiar works in the collection.”

■ Making Colour runs at the National Gallery until september 7.

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