Discover the Only Painting Van Gogh Ever Sold During His Lifetime

in Art, History | July 2nd, 2025

It may have crossed your mind, while behold­ing paint­ings of Vin­cent van Gogh, that you’d like to own one your­self some­day. If so, you’ll have to get in line with more than a few bil­lion­aires, and even they may nev­er see one go up on the auc­tion block. This would prob­a­bly come as a sur­prise to van Gogh him­self, who died des­ti­tute — and prac­ti­cal­ly unknown — after an artis­tic career of just ten years. In that time, he man­aged to sell exact­ly one paint­ing, at least accord­ing to cer­tain def­i­n­i­tions of “sell.” Van Gogh did barter paint­ings for food and art sup­plies, and he did accept com­mis­sions, begin­ning with one from his art-deal­er uncle Cor. But as for sales made to non-rel­a­tives through an offi­cial show, we only know of one: La vigne rouge.

Known in Eng­lish as The Red Vine­yards near Arles, or sim­ply The Red Vine­yard, the paint­ing depicts a land­scape van Gogh came across “on a late after­noon walk with Paul Gau­guin on 28 Octo­ber 1888, five days after his friend’s arrival in Arles.” So writes Mar­tin Bai­ley at The Art News­pa­per, who adds that “pick­ing the grapes nor­mal­ly takes place in Sep­tem­ber in Provence, but the har­vest seems to have been late that year.”

To his broth­er Theo, Vin­cent described the scene thus: “A red vine­yard, com­plete­ly red like red wine. In the dis­tance it became yel­low, and then a green sky with a sun, fields vio­let and sparkling yel­low here and there after the rain in which the set­ting sun was reflect­ed.” The artist was not, how­ev­er, moved to set up his can­vas then and there; rather, he paint­ed the vine­yard the next month, from mem­o­ry.

Vin­cent let Theo hang the result­ing can­vas in his Paris apart­ment until he asked for it back in order to exhib­it it in the annu­al Brus­sels show put on by a group called Les Vingt in ear­ly 1890. The Red Vine­yards’ buy­er was one of their num­ber, a cer­tain Anna Boch, the sis­ter of van Gogh’s col­league in impres­sion­ism (and one­time por­trait sub­ject) Eugène Boch. Though she was no rela­tion, Anna did pay full stick­er price for the paint­ing, and van Gogh lat­er expressed some regret about not giv­ing her a “friend’s price.” But what­ev­er it cost her, it was sure­ly a steal com­pared to its val­ue today, after its pur­chase by a Russ­ian col­lec­tor, its rev­o­lu­tion­ary expro­pri­a­tion, and its long Sovi­et sup­pres­sion fol­lowed by proud exhi­bi­tion at Moscow’s Pushkin State Muse­um of Fine Arts — which, owing to the paint­ing’s fragili­ty, won’t even lend it out.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed con­tent:

1,500 Paint­ings & Draw­ings by Vin­cent van Gogh Have Been Dig­i­tized & Put Online

Vin­cent Van Gogh’s The Star­ry Night: Why It’s a Great Paint­ing in 15 Min­utes

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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How 16th-Century Artist Joris Hoefnagel Made Insects Beautiful—and Changed Science Forever

in Art, History, Nature | July 2nd, 2025

In Eng­lish, most of the words we’d use to refer to insects sound off-putting at best and fear­some at worst, at least to those with­out an ento­mo­log­i­cal bent. Dutch, close a lin­guis­tic rela­tion though it may be, offers a more endear­ing alter­na­tive in beestjes, which refers to all these “lit­tle beasts” in which the artists and sci­en­tists of Europe start­ed to take a major inter­est in the late six­teenth cen­tu­ry. As was the style of that era, the mag­is­te­ria of art and sci­ence tend­ed to over­lap, a phe­nom­e­non nowhere more clear­ly reflect­ed — at least with regard to the insect king­dom — than in the work of Joris Hoef­nagel, a Flem­ish artist whose illus­tra­tions of beestjes com­bined beau­ty and accu­ra­cy in a man­ner nev­er seen before.


You can now see Hoef­nagel’s art up close at the exhi­bi­tion Lit­tle Beasts: Art, Won­der, and the Nat­ur­al World, which will be up at the Nation­al Gallery of Art in Wash­ing­ton, DC until ear­ly Novem­ber. If you won’t be able to make it out to the muse­um, have a look at the exhi­bi­tion’s web site, which shows off the splen­dor of Hoef­nagel’s work as pub­lished in The Four Ele­ments, a col­lec­tion of about 300 water­col­ors grouped into four vol­umes in the fif­teen-sev­en­ties and eight­ies, each one named for an ele­ment: Aqua con­tains water ani­mals; Ter­ra land ani­mals; Aier birds and plants; and Ignis, or “fire,” insects.

“We don’t real­ly know why Hoef­nagel put insects in the fire vol­ume,” says Evan “Nerd­writer” Puschak in the new video above. “Maybe because both fire and insects sym­bol­ize trans­for­ma­tion.”


“What we do know,” Puschak adds, “is that these insect minia­tures are mag­nif­i­cent­ly ren­dered.” Hoef­nagel even made improve­ments on the nature illus­tra­tions of his artis­tic pre­de­ces­sor Albrecht Dür­er, whose own abil­i­ties to ren­der our world with fideli­ty had been regard­ed as near­ly super­hu­man. One par­tic­u­lar work that sur­pass­es Dür­er is Hoef­nagel’s depic­tion of a stag bee­tle, which he accom­pa­nied with the Latin inscrip­tion “SCARABEI UMBRA,” or “the shad­ow of the stag bee­tle”: pos­si­bly a ref­er­ence to the unprece­dent­ed real­ism of the insec­t’s shad­ow as Hoef­nagel ren­dered it, but in any case a com­mon say­ing at the time about hol­low threats. For how­ev­er fright­en­ing the stag bee­tle looked, as Hoef­nagel well knew, the actu­al crea­ture was gen­tle — just anoth­er wee beast­ie after all.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Genius of Albrecht Dür­er Revealed in Four Self-Por­traits

Vladimir Nabokov’s Delight­ful But­ter­fly Draw­ings

Ernst Haeckel’s Sub­lime Draw­ings of Flo­ra and Fau­na: The Beau­ti­ful Sci­en­tif­ic Draw­ings That Influ­enced Europe’s Art Nou­veau Move­ment (1889)

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

Cap­ti­vat­ing Col­lab­o­ra­tion: Artist Hubert Duprat Uses Insects to Cre­ate Gold­en Sculp­tures

Watch The Insects’ Christ­mas from 1913: A Stop Motion Film Star­ring a Cast of Dead Bugs

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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A Visualization of the History of Technology: 1,889 Innovations Across Three Million Years

in History, Technology | June 30th, 2025

“Any suf­fi­cient­ly advanced tech­nol­o­gy is indis­tin­guish­able from mag­ic.” So holds the third and most famous of the “three laws” orig­i­nal­ly artic­u­lat­ed by sci­ence fic­tion writer Arthur C. Clarke. Even when it was first pub­lished in the late nine­teen-six­ties, Clarke’s third law would have felt true to any res­i­dent of the devel­oped world, sur­round­ed by and whol­ly depen­dent on advanced tech­nolo­gies whose work­ings they could scarce­ly hope to explain. Nat­u­ral­ly, it feels even truer now, a quar­ter of the way into our dig­i­tal twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry. Indeed, for all we know about how they real­ly work, our cred­it cards, our smart­phones, our com­put­ers, and indeed the inter­net itself might as well be mag­ic.

To best under­stand the tech­nol­o­gy that increas­ing­ly makes up our world, we should attempt to under­stand the evo­lu­tion of that tech­nol­o­gy. Those smart­phones, for exam­ple, could­n’t have been invent­ed in the form we know them with­out the pre­vi­ous devel­op­ments of chem­i­cal­ly strength­ened glass, the mul­ti-touch screen inter­face, and the cam­era phone. Each of those indi­vid­ual tech­nolo­gies also has its pre­de­ces­sors: fol­low the chain back far enough, and even­tu­al­ly you get to the likes of the mobile radio tele­phone, invent­ed in 1946; the phased array anten­na, invent­ed in 1905; and glass, invent­ed around 1500 BC. These and count­less oth­er paths can be traced at the His­tor­i­cal Tech Tree, an ambi­tious project of writer and pro­gram­mer Éti­enne Forti­er-Dubois.

Forti­er-Dubois cred­its among his inspi­ra­tions Sid Meier’s Civ­i­liza­tion games, with their all-impor­tant “tech trees,” and James Burke’s tele­vi­sion series Con­nec­tions, which high­light­ed the unpre­dictable process­es by which one inno­va­tion could lead to oth­ers across the cen­turies or mil­len­nia. Even in the sev­en­ties, Forti­er-Dubois writes, “Burke was already con­cerned that our lives depend on tech­no­log­i­cal sys­tems that very few peo­ple deeply under­stand. It is, of course, pos­si­ble to live with­out com­pre­hend­ing how com­put­ers, mon­ey, or air­planes work. But when every­thing around us feels vague­ly mag­i­cal, reliant on experts whose actions we have no way of ver­i­fy­ing, it’s easy to lose trust in tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tions to our cur­rent prob­lems.” He offers the His­tor­i­cal Tech Tree as a poten­tial cor­rec­tive to that loss of under­stand­ing and the ener­vat­ing atti­tudes it pro­duces.

Forti­er-Dubois him­self admits that the project “made me real­ize how lit­tle I knew about the objects around me. I didn’t real­ly know that ‘elec­tron­ics’ meant con­trol­ling the flow of elec­trons with vac­u­um tubes or semi­con­duc­tors, or that refin­ing petro­le­um into kerosene uses frac­tion­al dis­til­la­tion, or that WiFi and blue­tooth are just the use of cer­tain radio fre­quen­cies that can be detect­ed by a spe­cif­ic kind of chip.” Any­one who explores even this ear­ly ver­sion of the His­tor­i­cal Tech Tree (which, as of this writ­ing, con­tains 1886 tech­nolo­gies and 2180 con­nec­tions between them) will find it an edu­ca­tion­al expe­ri­ence in the same way, pro­vid­ing as it does not just knowl­edge about tech­nol­o­gybut a sense of how much of that knowl­edge we lack. Our civ­i­liza­tion has made its way from stone tools to rob­o­t­axis, mRNA vac­cines, and LLM chat­bots; we’d all be bet­ter able to inhab­it it with even a slight­ly clear­er idea of how it did so. Vis­it the His­tor­i­cal Tech Tree here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Inter­ac­tive Time­line Cov­er­ing 14 Bil­lion Years of His­to­ry: From The Big Bang to 2015

The Tree of Lan­guages Illus­trat­ed in a Big, Beau­ti­ful Info­graph­ic

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy Visu­al­ized

The Tree of Mod­ern Art: Ele­gant Draw­ing Visu­al­izes the Devel­op­ment of Mod­ern Art from Delacroix to Dalí (1940)

The His­to­ry of Mod­ern Art Visu­al­ized in a Mas­sive 130-Foot Time­line

The Map of Com­put­er Sci­ence: New Ani­ma­tion Presents a Sur­vey of Com­put­er Sci­ence, from Alan Tur­ing to “Aug­ment­ed Real­i­ty”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Hear the World’s Oldest Instrument, the “Neanderthal Flute,” Dating Back Over 43,000 Years

in History, Music | June 27th, 2025

Sev­er­al years ago, we brought you a tran­scrip­tion and a cou­ple of audio inter­pre­ta­tions of the old­est known song in the world, dis­cov­ered in the ancient Syr­i­an city of Ugar­it and dat­ing back to the 14th cen­tu­ry B.C.E.. Like­ly per­formed on an instru­ment resem­bling an ancient lyre, the so-called “Hur­ri­an Cult Song” or “Hur­ri­an Hymn No. 6” sounds oth­er­world­ly to our ears, although mod­ern-day musi­col­o­gists can only guess at the song’s tem­po and rhythm.

When we reach even fur­ther back in time, long before the advent of sys­tems of writ­ing, we are com­plete­ly at a loss as to the forms of music pre­his­toric humans might have pre­ferred. But we do know that music was like­ly a part of their every­day lives, as it is ours, and we have some sound evi­dence for the kinds of instru­ments they played. In 2008, arche­ol­o­gists dis­cov­ered frag­ments of flutes carved from vul­ture and mam­moth bones at a Stone Age cave site in south­ern Ger­many called Hohle Fels. These instru­ments date back 42,000 to 43,000 years and may sup­plant ear­li­er find­ings of flutes at a near­by site dat­ing back 35,000 years.

bone flute

Image via the The Archae­ol­o­gy News Net­work

The flutes are metic­u­lous­ly craft­ed, reports Nation­al Geo­graph­ic, par­tic­u­lar­ly the mam­moth bone flute, which would have been “espe­cial­ly chal­leng­ing to make.” At the time of their dis­cov­ery, researchers spec­u­lat­ed that the flutes “may have been one of the cul­tur­al accom­plish­ments that gave the first Euro­pean mod­ern-human (Homo sapi­ens) set­tlers an advan­tage over their now extinct Nean­derthal-human (Homo nean­derthalen­sis) cousins.” But as with so much of our knowl­edge about Nean­derthals, includ­ing new evi­dence of inter­breed­ing with Homo sapi­ens, these con­clu­sions may have to be revised.

It is per­haps pos­si­ble that the much-under­es­ti­mat­ed Nean­derthals made their own flutes. Or so a 1995 dis­cov­ery of a flute made from a cave bear femur might sug­gest. Found by arche­ol­o­gist Ivan Turk in a Nean­derthal camp­site at Div­je Babe in north­west­ern Slove­nia, this instru­ment (above) is esti­mat­ed to be over 43,000 years old and per­haps as much as 80,000 years old. Accord­ing to musi­col­o­gist Bob Fink, the flute’s four fin­ger holes match four notes of a dia­ton­ic (Do, Re, Mi…) scale. “Unless we deny it is a flute at all,” Fink argues, the notes of the flute “are inescapably dia­ton­ic and will sound like a near-per­fect fit with­in ANY kind of stan­dard dia­ton­ic scale, mod­ern or antique.” To demon­strate the point, the cura­tor of the Sloven­ian Nation­al Muse­um had a clay repli­ca of the flute made. You can hear it played at the top of the post by Sloven­ian musi­cian Ljuben Dimkaros­ki.

The pre­his­toric instru­ment does indeed pro­duce the whole and half tones of the dia­ton­ic scale, so com­plete­ly, in fact, that Dimkaros­ki is able to play frag­ments of sev­er­al com­po­si­tions by Beethoven, Ver­di, Rav­el, Dvořák, and oth­ers, as well as some free impro­vi­sa­tions “mock­ing ani­mal voic­es.” The video’s YouTube page explains his choice of music as “a pot­pour­ri of frag­ments from com­po­si­tions of var­i­ous authors,” select­ed “to show the capa­bil­i­ties of the instru­ment, tonal range, stac­ca­to, lega­to, glis­san­do….” (Dimkaros­ki claims to have fig­ured out how to play the instru­ment in a dream.) Although arche­ol­o­gists have hot­ly dis­put­ed whether or not the flute is actu­al­ly the work of Nean­derthals, as Turk sug­gest­ed, should it be so, the find­ing would con­tra­dict claims that the close human rel­a­tives “left no firm evi­dence of hav­ing been musi­cal.” But what­ev­er its ori­gin, it seems cer­tain­ly to be a hominid artifact—not the work of predators—and a key to unlock­ing the pre­his­to­ry of musi­cal expres­sion.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Old­est Song in the World: A Sumer­ian Hymn Writ­ten 3,400 Years Ago

What Ancient Greek Music Sound­ed Like: Hear a Recon­struc­tion That is ‘100% Accu­rate’

Hear the “Seik­i­los Epi­taph,” the Old­est Com­plete Song in the World: An Inspir­ing Tune from 100 BC

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Why Bob Dylan’s Unreleased “Blind Willie McTell” Is Now Considered a Masterpiece

in History, Music | June 25th, 2025

Most Dyla­nol­o­gists dis­agree about which is the sin­gle great­est song in Bob Dylan’s cat­a­log, but few would deny “Blind Willie McTell” a place high in the run­ning. It may come as a sur­prise — or, to those with a cer­tain idea of Dylan and his fan base, the exact oppo­site of a sur­prise — to learn that that song is an out­take, record­ed but nev­er quite com­plet­ed in the stu­dio and avail­able for years only in boot­leg form. “Blind Willie McTell” was a prod­uct of the ses­sions for what would become Infi­dels. Released in 1983, that album was received as some­thing of a return to form after the Chris­t­ian-themed tril­o­gy of Slow Train Com­ing, Saved, and Shot of Love that Dylan put out after being born again.

Of the mate­r­i­al offi­cial­ly includ­ed on Infi­dels, the great­est impact was prob­a­bly made by the album’s open­er “Jok­er­man,” at least in the punk ren­di­tion Dylan per­formed on Late Night with David Let­ter­man. Not that every Dyla­nol­o­gist is a fan of that song: in the Dai­ly Mav­er­ick, Drew For­rest calls it “ran­dom and inco­her­ent,” draw­ing an unfa­vor­able com­par­i­son with “Blind Willie McTell,” which is “sure to be remem­bered as one of Dylan’s most per­fect cre­ations.”

The sources of that per­fec­tion are many, as explained by Noah Lefevre in the new, near­ly 50-minute long Poly­phon­ic video above on this “unre­leased mas­ter­piece,” whose ori­gin and after­life under­score how thor­ough­ly Dylan inhab­its the musi­cal tra­di­tions from which he draws.

Like most major Dylan songs, “Blind Willie McTell” exists in sev­er­al ver­sions, but the one most lis­ten­ers know (offi­cial­ly released in 1991, eight years after its record­ing) fea­tures Mark Knopfler on twelve-string gui­tar and Dylan him­self on piano. Melod­i­cal­ly based on the jazz stan­dard “St. James Infir­mary Blues” and named after a real, pro­lif­ic musi­cian from Geor­gia, its sparse music and lyrics man­age to evoke a panoram­ic view encom­pass­ing the blues, the Bible, the ways of the old South, and indeed, the very his­to­ry of Amer­i­can music and slav­ery. Though Dylan him­self con­sid­ered the song unfin­ished, he came around to see its val­ue after hear­ing The Band work it into their show, and has by now per­formed it live him­self more than 200 times — none, in adher­ence to the pro­tean char­ac­ter of blues, folk, and jazz, quite the same as the last.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Mas­sive 55-Hour Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist of Bob Dylan Songs: Stream 763 Tracks

“Tan­gled Up in Blue”: Deci­pher­ing a Bob Dylan Mas­ter­piece

Hear the Uncen­sored Orig­i­nal Ver­sion of “Hur­ri­cane,” Bob Dylan’s Protest Song About Jailed Box­er Rubin “Hur­ri­cane” Carter (1976)

The Reli­gions of Bob Dylan: From Deliv­er­ing Evan­gel­i­cal Ser­mons to Singing Hava Nag­i­la With Har­ry Dean Stan­ton

How Bob Dylan Kept Rein­vent­ing His Song­writ­ing Process, Breath­ing New Life Into His Music

How Bob Dylan Cre­at­ed a Musi­cal & Lit­er­ary World All His Own: Four Video Essays

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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The Very First Coloring Book, The Little Folks’ Painting Book (Circa 1879)

in Coloring Books, History | June 25th, 2025

The_Little_Folks_Paint_Book

Fun­ny how not that long ago col­or­ing books were con­sid­ered the exclu­sive domain of chil­dren. How times have changed. If you are the sort of adult who unwinds with a big box of Cray­olas and pages of man­dalas or out­lines of Ryan Gosling, you owe a debt of grat­i­tude to the McLough­lin Broth­ers and illus­tra­tor Kate Green­away.

Their Lit­tle Folks’ Paint­ing Book burst onto the scene in around 1879 with such fun-to-col­or out­line engrav­ings as “The Owl’s Advice,” “A Flower Fairy,” and “Lit­tle Miss Pride,” each accom­pa­nied by nurs­ery rhymes and sto­ries. The abun­dance of mob caps, pinafores, and breech­es is of a piece with Green­away’s endur­ing takes on nurs­ery rhymes, though grown-up man­u­al dex­ter­i­ty seems almost manda­to­ry giv­en the tiny pat­terns and oth­er details.

See­ing as how there was no prece­dent, the pub­lish­ers of the world’s first col­or­ing book went ahead and filled in the fron­tispiece so that those tack­ling the oth­er hun­dred draw­ings would know what to do. (Hint: Stay inside the lines and don’t get too cre­ative with skin or hair col­or.)

Also note: the copy rep­re­sent­ed here has been care­ful­ly hand-col­ored by the pre­vi­ous own­ers, with one con­tribut­ing some exu­ber­ant scrib­bles in pen­cil. See the full book, and down­load it in var­i­ous for­mats, at Archive.org.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Col­or­ing Books from Libraries & Muse­ums: Down­load & Col­or Thou­sands of Free Images (2024)

The First Adult Col­or­ing Book: See the Sub­ver­sive Exec­u­tive Col­or­ing Book From 1961

Free Col­or­ing Books from The Pub­lic Domain Review: Down­load & Col­or Works by Hoku­sai, Albrecht Dür­er, Har­ry Clarke, Aubrey Beard­s­ley & More

A Free Shake­speare Col­or­ing Book: While Away the Hours Col­or­ing in Illus­tra­tions of 35 Clas­sic Plays

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How Scientists Recreated Ancient Egypt’s Long-Lost Pigment, “Egyptian Blue”

in Art, History, Science | June 24th, 2025

Pho­to cour­tesy of Wash­ing­ton State Uni­ver­si­ty.

It’s become fash­ion­able, in recent years, to observe that we live in an increas­ing­ly beige-and-gray world from which all col­or is being drained. Whether or not that’s real­ly the case, all of us still enjoy easy access to a range of col­ors that nobody in the ancient world could have imag­ined, and not just through our screens. Look around you, and your eye will soon fall upon some object or anoth­er whose hue alone would have looked impos­si­bly exot­ic in the civ­i­liza­tion of, say, ancient Egypt. My cof­fee cup offers a sim­ple but vivid exam­ple, with its blue-green, and maybe yours does too.

“Most ancient pig­ments were derived from nat­ur­al resources — ochre, char­coal, or lime, for exam­ple,” writes Ben Seal at Carnegie Muse­ums of Pitts­burgh. “In some cas­es, Egyp­tians were able to use lapis lazuli, a meta­mor­phic rock that was only found in Afghanistan, to rep­re­sent the col­or blue.” But such a “cost-pro­hib­i­tive and com­plete­ly imprac­ti­cal” source, as Seal quotes Carnegie Muse­um of Nat­ur­al His­to­ry Egyp­tol­o­gist Lisa Haney describ­ing it, moti­vat­ed ancient Egyp­tians to come up with “a process to emu­late its intense ultra­ma­rine hue. With­out a con­sis­tent way to rep­re­sent the beau­ti­ful blues of the world around them, they had to get cre­ative.”

Just this past May, Haney and a team of oth­er researchers from CMNH, Wash­ing­ton State Uni­ver­si­ty, and the Smith­son­ian Insti­tu­tion’s Muse­um Con­ser­va­tion Insti­tute pub­lished a paper on their work of re-cre­at­ing what’s called “Egypt­ian blue,” the ear­li­est known syn­thet­ic pig­ment. Extant on arti­facts and used also, it seems, in ancient Rome, and at least once in the Renais­sance (by no less a Renais­sance man than Raphael) its orig­i­nal recipe has since been lost to his­to­ry. Using peri­od mate­ri­als like “cal­ci­um car­bon­ate that could have been drawn from lime­stone or seashells; quartz sand; and a cop­per source” heat­ed to around 1,000 degrees Cel­sius, Seal writes, “the researchers pre­pared near­ly two dozen pow­dered pig­ments in a stun­ning range of blues.”

Pho­to cour­tesy of Wash­ing­ton State Uni­ver­si­ty.

The key was to repli­cate cupror­i­vaite, “the min­er­al that gave Egypt­ian blue such res­o­nance,” and one of those exper­i­men­tal pow­ders turned out to be 50 per­cent cupror­i­vaite by vol­ume. The result­ing pig­ment, as Art­net’s Bri­an Bouch­er writes, is of more than his­tor­i­cal inter­est, with poten­tial mod­ern uses “due to its opti­cal, mag­net­ic, and bio­log­i­cal prop­er­ties. It emits light in the near-infrared part of the elec­tro-mag­net­ic spec­trum, which peo­ple can’t see. For that rea­son, it could be used in appli­ca­tions like dust­ing for fin­ger­prints and for­mu­lat­ing coun­ter­feit-proof inks.” Here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, we may have all the blues we need, but as in the ancient world, the job of stay­ing one step ahead of coun­ter­feit­ers is nev­er done.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed con­tent:

A 3,000-Year-Old Painter’s Palette from Ancient Egypt, with Traces of the Orig­i­nal Col­ors Still In It

Behold Ancient Egypt­ian, Greek & Roman Sculp­tures in Their Orig­i­nal Col­or

The Met Dig­i­tal­ly Restores the Col­ors of an Ancient Egypt­ian Tem­ple, Using Pro­jec­tion Map­ping Tech­nol­o­gy

Dis­cov­er Harvard’s Col­lec­tion of 2,500 Pig­ments: Pre­serv­ing the World’s Rare, Won­der­ful Col­ors

Why Most Ancient Civ­i­liza­tions Had No Word for the Col­or Blue

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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“The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink”: An Ad for London’s First Cafe Printed Circa 1652

in Food & Drink, History | June 24th, 2025

The sto­ry of cof­fee goes back to the 13th cen­tu­ry, when it came out of Ethiopia, then spread to Egypt and Yemen. It reached the Mid­dle East, Turkey, and Per­sia dur­ing the 16th cen­tu­ry, and then Europe dur­ing the ear­ly 17th, though not with­out con­tro­ver­sy. In Venice, some called it the ‘bit­ter inven­tion of Satan,’ but the Pope, upon tast­ing it, gave it his bless­ing. By 1652, the first café in Lon­don had opened its doors on St. Michael’s Alley, bring­ing cof­fee to England—all thanks to a Sicil­ian immi­grant, Pasqua Rosée.

Today, the British Muse­um hous­es a hand­bill that may well be the first adver­tise­ment for cof­fee in Eng­land. It proves remark­able for a cou­ple of rea­sons. First, the ad intro­duced Brits to what’s now a sta­ple of the West­ern diet, and even­tu­al­ly they’d bring it to North Amer­i­ca. And, what’s more, you can see anoth­er instance of the adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Adver­tis­ing is adver­tis­ing. Then, as now, bev­er­ages were sold on their taste and health prop­er­ties. And, of course, you were encour­aged to con­sume the prod­uct not once, but twice a day. You can find a tran­scrip­tion of the text below.

Text:

THE Grain or Berry called Cof­fee, groweth upon lit­tle Trees, only in the Deserts of Ara­bia.

It is brought from thence, and drunk gen­er­al­ly through­out all the Grand Seigniors Domin­ions.

It is a sim­ple inno­cent thing, com­posed into a drink, by being dryed in an Oven, and ground to Pow­der, and boiled up with Spring water, and about half a pint of it to be drunk, fast­ing an hour before and not Eat­ing an hour after, and to be tak­en as hot as pos­si­bly can be endured; the which will nev­er fetch the skin off the mouth, or raise any Blis­ters, by rea­son of that Heat.

The Turks drink at meals and oth­er times, is usu­al­ly Water, and their Dyet con­sists much of Fruit, the Cru­di­ties where­of are very much cor­rect­ed by this Drink.

The qual­i­ty of this Drink is cold and Dry; and though it be a Dry­er, yet it nei­ther heats, nor inflames more than hot Pos­set.

It for­clos­eth the Ori­fice of the Stom­ack, and for­ti­fies the heat with- [miss­ing text] its very good to help diges­tion, and there­fore of great use to be [miss­ing text] bout 3 or 4 a Clock after­noon, as well as in the morn­ing.

[miss­ing text] quick­ens the Spir­its, and makes the Heart Light­some. 

[miss­ing text]is good against sore Eys, and the bet­ter if you hold your Head o’er it, and take in the Steem that way.

It supres­seth Fumes exceed­ing­ly, and there­fore good against the Head-ach, and will very much stop any Deflux­ion of Rheumas, that dis­til from the Head upon the Stom­ach, and so pre­vent and help Con­sump­tionsand the Cough of the Lungs.

It is excel­lent to pre­vent and cure the Drop­sy, Gout, and Scurvy.
It is known by expe­ri­ence to be bet­ter then any oth­er Dry­ing Drink for Peo­ple in years, or Chil­dren that have any run­ning humors upon them, as the Kings Evil. &c.

It is very good to pre­vent Mis-car­ry­ings in Child-bear­ing Women.

It is a most excel­lent Rem­e­dy against the Spleen, Hypocon­dri­ack Winds, or the like.

It will pre­vent Drowsi­ness, and make one fit for Busines, if one have occa­sion to Watch, and there­fore you are not to drink of it after Sup­per, unless you intend to be watch­ful, for it will hin­der sleep for 3 or 4 hours.

It is observed that in Turkey, where this is gen­er­al­ly drunk, that they are not trou­bled with the Stone, Gout, Drop­sie, or Scurvy, and that their Skins are exceed­ing cleer and white.

It is nei­ther Lax­a­tive nor Restrin­gent.

Made and Sold in St. Michaels Alley in Corn­hill, by Pasqua Rosee, at the Signe of his own Head.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2012.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

“The Virtues of Cof­fee” Explained in 1690 Ad: The Cure for Lethar­gy, Scurvy, Drop­sy, Gout & More

Jim Henson’s Com­mer­cials for Wilkins Cof­fee: 15 Twist­ed Min­utes of Mup­pet Cof­fee Ads (1957–1961)

The Birth of Espres­so: The Sto­ry Behind the Cof­fee Shots That Fuel Mod­ern Life

How Human­i­ty Got Hooked on Cof­fee: An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry

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