Why is it that most window frames are painted white? It was not always so. In the 18th and 19th centuries it was more usual for exterior joinery to be painted a dark colour. White glazing bars, in particular, have a big visual impact when the opposite was desirable. Glazing bars were only used because of the difficulty of making large sheets of glass and so they were decorated to be as unobtrusive as possible. There is even a colour called 'Invisible Green', suggesting that this dark green made the glazing bars almost invisible. Consider the photo below of a pair of Georgian houses in the Market Square at Louth, Lincolnshire. The windows are of identical size.
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White paint.
Titanium dioxide, derived from the mineral rutile, was known as a white pigment from about 1870 but was not in commercial production until 1919.
Zinc oxide, known to artists as Chinese white or permanent white, was first used in the late 18th century but not manufactured on an industrial scale until the mid 19th century.
White lead or flake white is a mixture of lead carbonate and lead hydroxide. It is the earliest known artificially made pigment and was in use in China from before their recorded history. It was the only white pigment widely available to artists until the mid 19th century and not superseded as an industrial pigment until after the First World War. It makes a very opaque paint with a flexible but tough, durable surface. It turns brown on exposure to sulphur fumes so the traditional not-brilliant white may be an artifice of air pollution. It is, of course, poisonous so should not be spread too thickly on toast.
Zinc white is unaffected by air pollution but it is less opaque than white lead and forms a hard, brittle surface film in oil paint so is less durable than lead paint. Titanium dioxide is the most opaque and permanent white pigment. In oil it forms a less flexible surface than white lead so may not be as durable. My wind-miller friend therefore uses lead paint on his sails but needs a licence from English Heritage to buy it. For most practical purposes titanium dioxide is the only white pigment. White linseed oil paint from Holkham Paints (made in Sweden by Allback) has both titanium dioxide and zinc oxide, along with chalk and a manganese drier.
As for period authenticity, our familiar townscapes of Victorian and Georgian white painted external joinery are largely a 20th century introduction. Dark colours were the norm when the buildings were new.
However, Evelyn wrote:
'For much of the 18th century window joinery was painted white or another light colour. (Georgian 'white' was never akin to the bleached bright whites so amenable to modern tastes; these stark whites are very much a product of the 20th century, being far too strident and dominating to be used on historical facades. Georgian whites were nearly always 'broken' - mixed with a tiny proportion of darker paints to give a richer effect; the result was often called not simply 'white' but often 'stone colour'.)
By the 1780s, however, some window, particularly when the in the context of painted stucco, were painted in darker hues. The architect John Yenn employed dark grey windows in a villa design of 1769, while William Chambers used grey windows at Somerset House in London few years later. And by 1800 dark greys and browns were surprisingly popular for fashionable homes. Sir John Soane frequently used dark painted sashes, while the leases of Nash's Regent's park development specifically called for the repainting of the windows in a brown, imitating oak joinery, particularly in rural 'cottage corners' and other products of the taste for the picturesque.
Many of these darker colours were over-painted with cream as a result of the late 19th century fashion for the chaste 'Queen Ann' style, and very few have survived the 20th century's rather disturbing passion to have everything whiter than white. Where there is no evidence of a darker colour, however, it is perhaps better to play safe and use a broken white for window joinery'.
See: Stephen Parissien, The Georgian Society Book of the Georgian House.
and Peter wrote:
I have studied this subject for many years and hope the following may be of interest...
Britain and The Netherlands share a maritime tradition. White painted sashes were a Dutch invention of the 17th c. In the 1620's the Dutch developed mass-production of white lead and shortly later invented the vertical sliding sash with pulleys and weights, as an improvement on the horizontal sash used on the horizontal sash used on battleships and yachts at the time. White lead paints resist the knocks and stress but are water permeable and not washable. Sash cases were often tarred or had tar mixed with the white lead for water-resistance (see Navy Board records at Kew) making a stone colour. Alternatively they could be coated in Brunswick Black (asphalt in boiled linseed oil) the origin of today's 'black gloss'.
Sandby's watercolours of Windsor in the 18th c show the whole town painted white. No other easy to grind white pigment remained opaque in oil. The paint was the first choice of painters where it could be afforded. Lamp black in oil with copal varnish added was a more practical alternative favoured by many for the new, thin astragals, being more practical. The alternative was oak graining which became very popular in the 19th c.
In the 1820's the chrome pigments became available and these made water-resistant colours possible - the Brunswick Greens being the most famous and applied mostly to iron. 'Brighton Green' was better on wood. The filth of smoke in towns made white lead impractical. Purple Brown was cheap and if mixed with varnish, very durable.
White lead is now outlawed except on I and II* despite the EU directive allowing it for all historic buildings one has to use alternatives - the best is antimony trioxide - but please use oil paints - not acrylic!'
Peter Maitland Hood Historic Buildings Consultant and the Real Paint and Varnish Co
Contact: biff@biffvernon.freeserve.co.uk
Lincolnshire
©Biff Vernon 2004, 2005