How copper acetoarsenite became the most exciting and most dangerous green on the Victorian palette, and what the modern tube labelled "Emerald Green" actually contains.

What Van Gogh's sunflowers can teach you about a pigment that lies in slow motion.

It disappeared from every palette around 1750, and nobody noticed for almost two centuries - here is what it actually does in oil and why it matters now.

The Renaissance's affordable cobalt blue had one catastrophic secret, and old paintings have been revealing it ever since.

What is actually in the tube, why it dries slowly, and how Rembrandt used bone black to make a robe darker than the shadows behind it.