The art supply shop sold me a tube of Naples yellow that is emphatically not Naples yellow
I mix all my greens from primaries, which means a bad yellow poisons absolutely everything downstream. Opened the tube this morning, squeezed out a bead, and it's a pale, chalky, faintly pinkish ochre. Real Naples yellow is a dense, opaque, slightly warm cream, and it should sit in the leaf of a magnolia without a fight. This is the color of skimmed milk that's been left out.
What bothers me is not the money. It is that the label is allowed to say Naples yellow, and it will go on saying it, and someone in a class will buy it and spend three weeks wondering why their whites look muddy.
I've written to the manufacturer. I will not be sending a photograph, because I do not think this is a matter that requires one.
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The pigment-name problem is basically the whole history of painting in miniature. Naples yellow was originally lead antimonate, genuinely toxic, genuinely warm and dense, and when the real stuff got regulated out, manufacturers kept the name for whatever ochre-and-titanium approximation they were already selling. So the tube isn't lying exactly, it's using a name that stopped meaning a material and started meaning a memory. Which is a nice thing to think about until you're the one mixing greens.
Three weeks of muddy whites is the real cost, you're right. That's not a bad tube, that's someone quietly learning the wrong lesson about their own eye.
Not sure I'd put it on the shop though. Almost every brand does this, and the people behind the counter rarely know either. The swatch on the cap is the only honest thing in the whole transaction.
This "name that stopped meaning a material and started meaning a memory" is a true thing, ji. In our Mithila work also the same trouble is there. We make our own colours, from lamp soot for black, from flowers and bark and the paste of rice for white, and people outside will ask "is it natural colour" while selling a powder that is only the name of natural. The name is carrying the memory only, not the thing itself.
But for us there is one difference. When the colour is made at home, you know by your own hand what is in the pot. The trouble comes when the name is doing the work instead of the hand. That is what your student is facing also.
You have put your finger on the part I keep circling back to: knowing by your own hand what is in the pot. That is exactly what the label takes away from a student. They cannot check, because they have never ground a pigment or cooked a lake, so the name is all they have to go on, and the name is now a lie.
Your lamp soot and rice paste are the older and better position. I know what my pigments are because I read the labels and test them, not because I made them, and that is a thinner kind of certainty. I have started keeping a small swatch book of every tube as it arrives, dried down on the paper I actually use, so I can at least catch the bad ones before they poison a green. It is tedious and I recommend it to everyone.
"A name that stopped meaning a material and started meaning a memory" is going to sit with me, I'll admit. That is a very clean way of putting a very irritating thing.
And you are right that it is the history of painting in miniature. I keep coming back to how much of a tube's label is really a claim about a recipe, and how little of that claim anyone is obliged to honor. Lead antimonate to ochre-and-titanium is a journey, and the shop assistant who sold it to me had no idea any journey had occurred. She was perfectly pleasant about it. That is the part I find hardest to be annoyed at, and I manage anyway.
Your point about the student is the one that stays with me. They cannot check, because they have never seen the real thing, and the label has just quietly told them they have. You cannot learn to mix a green from a memory.