Gamblin, who originally became interested in manufacturing oils as a painter, created four small oil sketches of an intensely colorful landscape, repeating the theme with the different palettes that were available at three periods in history. In the fourth painting, he compared tints of all the colors used from the seventeenth century to the present. The reds were rather muted, the yellows had a terrible texture, and the verdigris couldn't be mixed with anything else. I did find the iron oxides very interesting, however. In the next two paintings I did, I wanted intense red mountains, and intense yellow ground, and an intense purple road, and the colors were all right there - and they all had beautiful working characteristics.
All colors have their charms and their value to painters.
When cadmiums, cobalts, and leads came together with hydrated chromium oxide and other modern inorganic colors, painters for the first time had a set of colors that were uniformly brilliant and opaque, and had working properties that were all pretty equal. I could actually choose the temperature of a color within a hue. It was very interesting to be able to do this. If I wanted a red, I could select any red from the bluest to the most orange, and I could change its temperature without going to another hue. With the coming of organic colors in the twentieth century, the shift of hues was extended, although Gamblin feels that the major contribution of the organic colors to the world of color was their capacity to produce tints of an intensity never before possible.