'Colours and other materials, when not furnished by monks were provided by the Apothecary'

Sir Charles Eastlake 1847

Methods and Materials of Painting of the Great Schools and Masters

Why Apothecary Artist?

For centuries, artists would travel extraordinary distances for a single pigment.

Rembrandt had a particular fondness for a yellow ochre that came all the way from Cyprus, worth the journey for a colour no other source could give him.

Before the mid-eighteenth century, every pigment a painter used was drawn from natural materials, or produced through chemical processes rooted in substances found in the earth. There was no other option. Colour came from the ground, or it didn't come at all.

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What's easy to forget now is that these pigments rarely had only one purpose. Many doubled as remedies. Yellow antimony, a soft, quiet colour, was also prescribed as an eye ointment. The line between paint and medicine was nowhere near as fixed as we imagine it today, because both came from the same place: a small hoard of natural substances, understood and handled by people who knew their properties intimately.

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That place had a name, the Apothecary. For centuries, what we would now call a pharmacy or chemist was known as an apothecary and it was so much more than that. An apothecary was a hub of trade and knowledge, the place a painter went to find everything a studio needed: oils, resins, tree gums, and of course, pigments. Part supplier, part chemist, part keeper of secrets. Whoever ran that shop understood exactly what each substance could do, and where in the world it had come from.

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I didn't set out to recreate one in my studio. My research into historical materials simply kept growing and with it, my fascination. Every new pigment led to another source, another story, another glass jar on the shelf. One day I looked around my studio and realised I had created an Apothecary of my own: rows of glass containing ochres and stones and pigments from across the world, each one labelled, each one with its own history, each one waiting to become part of a painting.

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That's where the Apothecary Artist name comes from. Not a marketing flourish, but a fairly literal description of what surrounds me every day and an acknowledgment of the tradition I've found myself standing inside, whether I intended to or not. I'm honoured to be part of a lineage that stretches back through every artist who ever travelled for the right ochre, every apothecary who understood a pigment's secret second life.

It's a tradition worth continuing, one glass jar at a time. Thank you for sharing this journey too.