“woodwork. Oil paints were a more complex proposition. They consisted of a base (usually lead carbonate, or “white lead”), a pigment for color, a binder such as linseed oil to make it stick, and thickening agents like wax or soap, which is slightly surprising because eighteenth-century oil paints were already pretty glutinous and difficult to apply—“like spreading tar with a broom,” in the words of the writer David Owen. It wasn’t until someone discovered that adding turpentine, a natural thinner distilled from the sap of pine trees, made the paint easier to apply that painting became smoother in every sense. Turpentine also gave paint a matte finish, and this became a fashionable look by the late eighteenth century. Linseed oil was the magical ingredient in paint, because it hardened into a tough film—essentially made paint paint. Linseed oil is squeezed from the seeds of flax, the plant from which linen comes (which is why flaxseeds are also called linseeds). Its one dramatic downside was that it is extremely combustible— Painting was especially skillful because painters ground their own pigments and mixed their own paints—in other words created their own colors—and generally did so in great secrecy in order to maintain a commercial advantage over their rivals. (Add resins to linseed oil instead of pigment, and you get varnish. Painters made their varnishes in great secrecy, too.) Paint had to be mixed in small portions and used at once, so painters had to be able to make matching batches from day to day. They coats, since even the best paints had little opacity. Covering a wall usually took at least five coats, so painting was a big, disruptive, and fairly technical undertaking. Pigments varied in price significantly. Duller colors, like off-white and stone, could be had for four or five pence a pound. Blues and yellows were two to three times as expensive, and so tended to be used only by the middle classes and above. Smalt, a shade of blue made with ground glass (which gave a glittery effect), and azurite, made from a semiprecious stone, were dearer still. The most expensive of all was verdigris, which was made by hanging copper strips over a vat of horse dung and vinegar and then scraping off the oxidized copper that resulted. It is the same process that turns copper domes and statues green—just quicker and more commercial—and it made “the delicatest Grass-green in the world,” as one eighteenth-century admirer enthused. A room painted in verdigris always produced produced an appreciative “ah” in visitors. When paints became popular, people wanted them to be as vivid as they could possibly be made. The restrained colors that we associate with the Georgian period in Britain, or the colonial period in America, are a consequence of fading, not decorative restraint. In 1979, when Mount Vernon began a program of repainting the interiors in faithful colors, “people came and just yelled at us,” Dennis Pogue, the curator, told me with a grin. “They told us we were making Mount Vernon garish. They were right—we were. But that’s just because that’s the way it was. It was hard for a lot of people to accept that what we were doing was faithful restoration. “Even now paint charts for colonial-style paints virtually always show the colors from the period as muted. In fact, colors were actually nearly always quite deep and sometimes even startling. The richer a color you could get, the more you tended to be admired. For one thing, rich colors generally denoted expense, since you needed a lot of pigment to make them. Also, you need to remember that often these colors were seen by candlelight, so they needed to be more forceful to have any kind of impact in muted light.” Bryson, Bill. At Home (pp. 451-452). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 451). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (pp. 450-451). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 450). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (pp. 449-450). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 449). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. ”