British Paintboxes

I can't remember when I wasn't fascinated with color. Like most small children I was mesmerized with fireworks, staring open-mouthed at the sky watching the hues glitter and shift and turn from red to silver or blue to gold. An eight-box of Crayola crayons turned into sixteen, and then to 48. I pleaded with my mother for years to buy me a box of 64s, and she couldn't understand, with the practicality of someone raised during the Depression, why one needed so many more colors. At Christmas finally I began saving up my allowance and buying my own. I'd use them to make my own calendars, but only after I had carefully put the colors in order: black and grey first, then the browns, then the colors of the spectrum from violet to red, finally the pinks, then silver and white. (Gold went with the yellows and copper with the browns.) And they had to be in the correct order or it-just-wouldn't-do.

Really, it was Mom who began the color obsession in the first place. I'd asked for a watercolor paint box for Christmas, expecting a neat set of sixteen cakes of color labeled with traditional color names from red to violet to green. Instead, Mom bought me a big tin of paints, maybe 9x12, the top of which was some type of impressionist painting—a Monet garden, perhaps—and inside there were 108 little cakes of color, like the box shown above. I was dazzled! Even better, this was a British-made paintbox, and the little cakes of color had luscious, exotic names that rolled off the tongue with sensual delight: chrome yellow, ultramarine, lamp black, cadmium yellow, Prussian blue, yellow ochre, raw sienna, crimson lake, cadmium red, rose madder, zinc white, Indian yellow, cobalt blue, viridian, brown madder, raw umber, sepia, indigo, ivory black, Chinese white, and more. I think I was more fascinated by the names than I was by the actual range of colors, especially since I never did get the hang of watercolors and I ruined about half of the fascinating little cakes with the holes you see in some of the cakes above without turning out a decent watercolor for my pains. When I think back on that paintbox and those wonderful names, it reminds me how the most ordinary things like cakes of watercolor because exotic by means of the nomenclature given to them.

I always wonder if they still make paintboxes like this. I imagine myself like Beatrix in the film Miss Potter using the colours—and how much more rich they sound by including that "u"!—to add dainty detail to an exquisite drawing, until I remember I still haven't mastered watercolors. Perhaps it's just as well the ordinary sets of sixteen cakes are available for those of us who still need training wheels on our paintbrushes.