Though house paint decorates our homes and protects their surfaces from rot, drying, and the elements, we often take it for granted. But this unassuming product does in fact have a long and interesting history which cannot be easily summarized. However, a short history of paint can be just as fascinating as the long version. In that spirit, we present a few snapshots of house paint’s evolution in order to heighten your appreciation of it, and to provide some perspective on humans’ need to secure and beautify their dwelling places.

Forty millennia ago, cave inhabitants combined various substances with animal fat to make paint, which they used to add pictures and colors to the walls of their crude homes. Red and yellow ochre, hematite, manganese oxide, and charcoal were all employed as color elements. Starting around 3150 B.C., ancient Egyptian painters mixed a base of oil or fat with color elements like ground glass or semiprecious stones, lead, earth, or animal blood. White, black, blue, red, yellow, and green were their hues of choice. At the turn of the 14th century, house painters in England created guilds, which established standards for the profession and kept trade secrets under lock and key. By the 17th century, technology and new practices in house paint grew.

In this era of reality TV and manufactured celebrities, it can be hard to remember the definition of modesty. For the Pilgrims, who populated the American colonies in the 17th century, modesty meant avoiding all displays of joy, wealth, or vanity. Painting one’s house was considered highly immodest and even sacrilegious. In 1630, a rebellious Charlestown preacher decorated his house’s interior with paint and was thus brought up on criminal charges of sacrilege.

This colonial Puritanism could not stop the demand for house paint, though. Unknown authors published “cookbooks” that had recipes for different paints. One popular process, known as the Dutch method, combined lime and ground oyster shells to make a white wash, to which iron or copper oxide – for red or green color, respectively – could be added. Colonial paint “cooks” also used items from the pantry, including milk, egg whites, coffee, and rice, to turn out their illegal product.

Water and oil were the main bases for paint creation from the 17th century to the 19th. Each held certain colors better than others, and there were differences in cost and durability between them, too. Water-based paints were used for ceilings and plaster walls, and oils were used for joinery. Some homeowners wanted walls that looked like wood, marble, or bronze and ceilings that resembled a blue sky with puffy white clouds. Painters of this period would fulfill these requests. Even in 1638, a historic home named “Ham House” in Surrey, England, was renovated. Renovating the home was a multiple-step process, involving the usage of primer, a couple of undercoats, and a finishing coat of paint to show paneling and cornices in the home. At this point in paint’s evolution, pigment and oil were mixed by hand to make a stiff paste – a practice still employed today. If a pigment is well-ground, it should disperse almost entirely in oil. Unfortunately, before the 18th century, hand-grinding could expose painters to white-lead powder, which could result in lead poisoning. Even though lead paint was toxic, it was popular during this time because of its durability, and even today it’s difficult to replicate that hardiness in paint. Painters did eventually add air extraction systems in their workshops to reduce the health risks occurring from grinding lead-based pigment. Not until 1978 did the U.S. finally ban the sale of lead house paint.

Paint production transformed dramatically during the 1700s. The first American paint mill opened in 1700 in Boston, Mass. In 1718, the Englishman Marshall Smith devised a “Machine or Engine for the Grinding of Colours,” which prompted a sort of arms race with regard to grinding pigment efficiently. In 1741, the English company Emerton and Manby publicized the “Horse-Mills” it used to grind pigment, which allowed it to sell paint at prices its rivals couldn’t match. Elizabeth Emerton, one of the owners, said, “One Pound of Colour ground in a Horse-Mill will paint twelve Yards of Work, whereas Colour ground any other Way, will not do half that Quantity .”
As any steampunk aficionado will tell you, the turn of the 19th century meant the rise of steam power. Paint mills were no exception; at this point in time, most of them ran on steam. Another, more significant improvement also occurred around this time: Nontoxic zinc oxide became a viable base for white pigment, thanks to European ingenuity it came to the US in 1855.

By the end of the 1800s, roller mills had started to grind pigment as well as grain, and the guild system that had organized English house painters for centuries became a network of trade unions. Mass production of paint was no longer a pipe dream, and linseed oil, a cheap binding agent that also helped protect wood, made it even easier.

It was in the 19th century that decorating a home with paint became the norm rather than an outlier. After all, paint made surfaces washable and, by sealing in wood’s natural oils, kept walls from becoming either too moist or too dry.

Sherwin Williams, a giant behemoth in the paint world today, was founded in 1866. The company was the first maker of ready-to-use paint; its original product, raw umber in oil, debuted in 1873. Soon after that, cofounder Henry Sherwin developed a resealable tin can.

Benjamin Moore, one of Sherwin Williams top competitors, was born in 1883. Twenty-four years passed, and the company created a research department headed up by one chemist. Since then, Benjamin Moore Paint has contributed a great deal to paint technology, but the company’s color-matching system, unveiled in 1982 and entirely computer-based, is still considered by many to be its most noteworthy achievement in the 21st century, paint remains a formidable moneymaker; roughly $20.9 billion of the stuff was sold in 2006 alone.

Though house paint is most frequently applied to the surfaces of a home, many artists have used it to bring their canvases to life. John Frost, an American painter who began his career in 1919, employed the use of house paint to paint the history of his hometown, a tiny village called Marblehead in Massachusetts. Picasso and some of his peers used house paint in their work. Even some modern artists, like Pollack admirer Nik Ehm, experiment with house paint as a medium.

Mid-20th century is when necessity became the mother of invention. World War II led to a dearth of linseed oil, so chemists combined alcohols and acids to make alkyds, artificial resins that could substitute for natural oil.
Most house paint today is acrylic, or water-based, paint; however, milk paint, which reached the height of its popularity in the 19th century for its unassuming hues, is cropping up again thanks to the environmental movement.
Interior painting has origins dating to pre-history.
Specifically, milk paint doesn’t have any volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. Conventional latex paint, on the other hand, does contain them, which makes it potentially hazardous to humans and pets. Extended exposure to VOCs can lead to organ or nerve damage, and some may be carcinogenic. Thankfully, most paint companies have low or zero VOC paint available. The term “zero-VOC,” by EPA standards, means that each liter of paint contains fewer than 5 grams of volatile compounds. Other non-VOC options include clay- and water-based paints. If you suffer from allergies, you must used low-VOC paint. In fact, they offer practical advantages no matter what your circumstances, since their lack of strong odor lets you occupy freshly painted rooms relatively soon.
Despite its outward simplicity, paint has adjusted over the millennium to conform to our aesthetic, financial, and health needs. While paint may seem basic, it’s almost miraculous that it can elevate our mood so drastically. The next time you open a can of paint, consider how far through time it’s traveled to add a little beauty to your life.