Alexandra Loske on the most visceral and organic of artists’ tools.

I have been hunting for and writing about artists’ palettes for many years, as part of my wider research into colour, and – more specifically – to write The Artist’s Palette. If pigments and paints are the raw materials with which a painting is created, then the palette is where the artist’s mind and the materiality of their art meet, the physical stage on which an idea, a plan, a chromatic vision is laid out and played out.

I have always been fascinated by artists’ studios, their contents, how artists use the tools of their trade, and have visited several Sussex studios, always feeling privileged and voyeuristic in equal measure. Usually, I leave with a trophy, such as a thimble-full of real ultramarine pigment from Mary Anne Aytoun Ellis, a stack of used paper palettes from Fergus Hare, or photographs of Julian Bell’s hand caressing his favourite tubes of oil paint.

Palettes are perhaps the ultimate trophies, as they are such potent visual and material storytellers, and can form a direct, physical and visceral link to a living or long-dead artist. Some of the stories they tell are tragic: the palettes left behind in the studios of Paula Modersohn-Becker or Egon Schiele are symbols of exceptional artists’ lives cut short, and have become symbols of what could have been. Palettes are particularly fascinating when they bear the marks of the artist who used them, such as fingerprints in the paint, empty areas where a thumb rested, or scratches and breakages that speak of how they were used. I have often been struck by how some palettes resemble organs (hearts, kidneys, hands…) and how they often connect the artist’s body and the artwork in a composition, especially in self-portraits. The word palette is of course related to palate – another part of the human anatomy.

Palettes are also mirrors, reflecting not just the artist’s intention and ideas for an artwork, but also how they worked, whether they are tidy and measured in their mixing, blending and applying paint. You would expect an uncleaned palette to resemble the painting style of the artist, and some do just that. You can clearly see the instinctive, emotional urgency of Vincent van Gogh in the palette left behind after painting Marguerite Gachet at the Piano. Piet Mondrian’s square metal palette looks almost comically like one of his grid paintings, while Lucian Freud’s wild, earthy paints seem to have a life of their own, vertiginously hanging over the edge of the palette, looking just like the flesh and skin he painted so unflinchingly. Others are surprising in how they differ from the artwork. Vilhelm Hammershøi’s palette puzzled me: If you are familiar with his thinly painted and gauzily layered paintings, you would not expect to see thrown-up heaps of oil paint on his palette, reminiscent of lunar landscapes.

A similarly mountainous palette I saw recently appears to accidentally resemble the very landscape and art that inspired its owner: Julian Le Bas’ palette seems to have organically grown a mound of oil paint resembling Sussex’s Mount Caburn, or Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire. Julian, who predominantly paints Sussex landscapes, is indeed strongly inspired by Cézanne’s work.

Having written The Artist’s Palette (on the suggestion of Julian Bell), I often get asked ‘Do you have any favourite palettes?’ I have many, as each one tells a different story. One of them belonged to Winifred Nicholson. Her interest in painting light and luminosity found a new lease of creativity when, in the mid-1970s and in her eighties, she was gifted two glass prisms. She carried them with her in a small pouch and referred to them as ‘little pots of gold’.

Her palette probably dates from these last few years of her life, when she painted so-called ‘prismatic paintings’, mostly sitting down in her ‘sunroom’. A key colour range in her work was pinks, violets, purples, and magenta, often in juxtaposition with yellows, creating vibrating, glowing effects. The palette looks heavily used and has been wiped and scraped many times. It has chipped edges, and a piece of it has broken off, which is one of its mysteries. There is not a lot of paint left on it, but the colours are unmistakably those used by Nicholson to paint light; and the important violets, pinks and magentas are near the thumbhole.

Edward Hopper’s palette was the last one I worked on. It is the only known palette by the great American painter of eeriness and emptiness. Hopper remains almost as inscrutable as his paintings, and this palette was also reluctant to give up all its secrets. It looks as if it has been scraped or wiped down, in order to be used again, although not completely. While the thinness of the paint may be a result of cleaning, Hopper did also paint in thin layers, diluting the paint with turpentine and adding oil as he went along, moving swiftly away from his early impasto work in paler colours. The oil paint left on still glows warmly, giving a sense of his preferred choice of rich and saturated hues, often in combination with gleaming whites and very dark shades.

Hopper was clearly aware of the colour theory that informed the works of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists he had seen on his European travels: he often used complementary colours, resulting in a glowing, sometimes garish, tonality, especially in his urban and night scenes. In his painting Chop Suey (1929), with which I have paired this palette in my book, saturated oranges and reds form the central axis of the composition, contrasting with the blues of one of the women’s hats, the interior walls and external shadows. To complete the colour wheel, the other woman’s top is of a rich green. Hopper softens this arrangement with ochres, umbers, muted mauves, and the alabaster white of the table and main figure’s face. Look closely and you can spot similar colours on his ghostly palette.

Alexandra Loske is the author of The Artist’s Palette, Thames & Hudson, 2025.