Still Life with Fruits in Porcelain, by Jacob Van Es. It's a bowl of black berries, grapes, and pears, with some strawberries in a bowl next to it, and a flower sticking out. there are some grapes outside of the bowl too. The strawberries are a really vibrant and powerful red, along with the blackberries and the rose, but the grapes and pears look mostly uniformly a mix of yellow and dirty-green

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1. Lisp Witch (alexandria@cybre.space)'s status on Thursday, 24-Mar-2022 09:24:35 UTC Lisp Witch

   in reply to

   Different pigments themselves have different light-fastness, which is a measure of how long it takes it to vanish under UV light. If you look at old paintings, sometimes you will see grey or missing colours. This is because the paint literally faded from the page.

   In this painting by Jacob Van Es from 1630, you can see not only how the paints have faded over the last 400 years, but also the accumulated grime over the background. Notice the grapes look kinda uniformly yellowy along with the plums and pears, but the strawberries are vibrant.

   It's possible that those blackberries were perhaps bluer at one point, or much more vivid and bright. That those grapes were a vivid bright green. But the yellows and reds are the least lightfast colours in the painting, so they have stayed strong these 400 years!

   (cont)