How painters have used black, from Hals to Matisse

Art students are often told that the Impressionists threw black off the palette and built their shadows from blues and violets instead. There is something in it. But several of the painters the Impressionists admired most were masters of black, and laboratory analysis of Impressionist canvases finds black in places the legend says it should not be.

Hals and his blacks

Frans Hals, working in Haarlem in the seventeenth century, could make a black garment carry folds, sheen and weight with very little else on his palette. The Wallace Collection points to the black sash in The Laughing Cavalier as an example, and notes that Vincent van Gogh exclaimed that Hals "must have had 27 blacks".¹ Van Gogh saw Hals in Amsterdam in October 1885 and wrote to his brother Theo about "the most beautiful blacks against the most beautiful whites" in a group portrait by Hals and Pieter Codde.² In the same letter he reports the Dutch painter Jozef Israëls saying that one must not paint black, and argues that this does not rule out blacks, browns and deep blues. He was pleased, he wrote, that his own studies had been judged too black, because colour belongs in the shadows as well.²

Goya's house

In February 1819 Francisco de Goya bought a country house outside Madrid known as the Quinta del Sordo, the House of the Deaf Man. From around 1820 he covered the walls of its two main rooms in oil paint, and the work was finished by 1823.³ These fourteen pictures, now called the Black Paintings, were not commissioned and were almost certainly never meant to leave the house. Goya gave them no titles that anyone recorded. Names such as Saturn Devouring His Son were attached later by cataloguers and historians.⁴ Even here the black is not total. In the portrait of a woman known as Leocadia, the Fundación Goya en Aragón notes, he also used white and ochre, and the black sits mainly in her dress.³ The paintings survive because Emil d'Erlanger bought the decaying house in 1873 and paid Salvador Martínez Cubells, a restorer working for the Prado, to transfer them from plaster to canvas. They were shown in Paris in 1878, and d'Erlanger then gave them to the Spanish state.³

Manet

Édouard Manet went to Madrid in 1865 to look at Velázquez and came away calling him the "painter of painters". The Prado traces a line from that visit to Manet's habit of setting a figure dressed in black against a pale, undefined space, as in The Fifer of 1866.⁵ His 1872 portrait of Berthe Morisot, lit hard from the side, is mostly black hat, black clothes and black hair. He even gave her black eyes, though hers were green. The Musée d'Orsay calls the picture a sublime variation on black and suggests it reminded Morisot, who was then moving towards the lighter Impressionist palette, of the astonishing power of blacks. Paul Valéry wrote in 1932 that he placed nothing in Manet's work above it.⁶

Manet kept using black through the years when his Impressionist friends were supposed to be avoiding it. In Corner of a Café-Concert, probably painted between 1878 and 1880 and now in the National Gallery in London, analysis of the waitress's blouse found ivory black with smaller amounts of cobalt blue, red lake and chrome orange mixed in.⁷

Did the Impressionists ban it?

Monet is the painter most closely tied to the ban. At his funeral in December 1926 his friend Georges Clemenceau objected to the dark cloth over the coffin, saying "No black for Monet", and replaced it with an old cretonne printed with blue and pink flowers.⁸ Monet's own darks were usually mixed. In The Gare Saint-Lazare of 1877, National Gallery scientists found that he reached the deep tones of the station by mixing a wide range of pigments, among them ultramarine, cobalt blue, viridian, vermilion and red lake, in varying proportions. Ivory black is present, but only as a trace in the shadows of the canopy.⁹ Pissarro and the Divisionists who followed him did avoid black, partly so that colours placed side by side would mix in the viewer's eye.¹⁰

Renoir is harder to place. In At the Theatre (La Première Sortie), painted in 1876 and 1877, a dark purplish-blue dress was painted with ivory black alongside cobalt blue and red lake.¹¹ He is also widely quoted as calling black the "Queen of Colors", a line repeated in a 2026 scientific review of black in Impressionist painting, though where and when he said it is hard to pin down.¹⁰ The Impressionist turn away from black was a real tendency, held most strictly by Monet. The evidence of the paintings shows it was never a rule the whole group kept.

Whistler's arrangements

James McNeill Whistler went further than anyone in making black the subject of a picture. In 1871 he painted his mother seated in profile and showed the portrait at the Royal Academy the following year as Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter's Mother.¹² The restricted palette of grey, black and white gave the painting its title. The French state bought it in 1891 and it now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay.¹³

His Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket of 1875 shows a fireworks display at Cremorne Gardens in London as scattered sparks of gold in a dark night.¹⁴ It was shown at the Grosvenor Gallery priced at 200 guineas, and John Ruskin accused Whistler of "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face".¹⁵ Whistler sued Ruskin for libel in 1878 and won, but the damages came to one farthing.¹⁴ The farthing did little to stop his bankruptcy the following year.¹⁵ The painting has belonged to the Detroit Institute of Arts since 1946.¹⁴

Matisse makes the case

In December 1946 the Galerie Maeght in Paris opened an exhibition called Le Noir est une couleur, or Black Is a Colour. Henri Matisse's remarks for it appeared in the first issue of the gallery's publication, Derrière le miroir. He pointed to Japanese printmakers, who had long used black as a colour, and to the black velvet jackets in Manet's paintings, which he saw as full of light. Since the Impressionists, he said, black had steadily become a more independent part of the colour harmony, much as the double bass had come to be given solo passages.¹⁶ His own Liseuse sur fond noir (Woman Reading against a Black Background), painted in Paris in August 1939, pairs black with pink in a nod to Manet, and the Centre Pompidou treats its black ground as the most important element in the picture.¹⁶

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1. The Wallace Collection, The Laughing Cavalier, The Wallace Collection.
2. Vincent van Gogh, Letter to Theo van Gogh, Nuenen, 10 or 11 October 1885, WebExhibits, Van Gogh's Letters.
3. Fundación Goya en Aragón, La Leocadia, Fundación Goya en Aragón.
4. Wikipedia, Black Paintings, Wikimedia Foundation.
5. Museo Nacional del Prado, Manet in the Prado, Museo Nacional del Prado.
6. Musée d'Orsay, Berthe Morisot au bouquet de violettes, Musée d'Orsay.
7. ColourLex, Édouard Manet, Corner of a Café-Concert, ColourLex, after D. Bomford and A. Roy, National Gallery Technical Bulletin 7, 1983.
8. National Gallery of Victoria, Monet timeline: Monet's funeral, National Gallery of Victoria.
9. ColourLex, Claude Monet, The Gare Saint-Lazare, ColourLex, after D. Bomford, J. Kirby, J. Leighton and A. Roy, Art in the Making: Impressionism, National Gallery Publications, 1990.
10. J.S. Werner, Black in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: Art, Color Vision, and Psychophysics, Color Research and Application 51(3), 2026.
11. ColourLex, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, At the Theatre, ColourLex, after D. Bomford, J. Leighton, J. Kirby and A. Roy, Impressionism: Art in the Making, National Gallery, 1991.
12. University of Glasgow, Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter's Mother, The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler: A Catalogue Raisonné, The Hunterian.
13. Karen Chernick, The surprising history behind Whistler's Mother, Artnet News, 2026.
14. Detroit Institute of Arts, Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket, Detroit Institute of Arts.
15. Caroline Bugler, In Focus: James McNeill Whistler, the American in London who flung a pot of paint in the public's face, Country Life, 2022.
16. Centre Pompidou, Henri Matisse, Liseuse sur fond noir, Centre Pompidou.