Stil de grain yellow
Description
1) A natural, transparent yellow containing rhamnetin (buckthorn berries) or quercitron (oak bark). Used since the 16th century, stil de grain, also called Dutch pink, was extracted from green, unripe buckthorn berries of Rhamnus cathartica (commonly called Avignon berries or graine d'Avignon). The plant berries are steeped in a lye (potash), then precipitated on chalk or alumina trihydrate to create a translucent yellow “lake” pigment. Later, after 1819, a similar color was obtained oak bark. Stil de grain is fugitive and not recommended for permanent paintings. Brown pink, a darker version of the color prepared with a ferrous sulfate mordant, was popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
2) The French name for Dutch pink (Mayer 1969).
Synonyms and Related Terms
Dutch pink; Natural Yellow 14; CI 75440; stil-de-grain (Fr.); pink berry lake; yellow berries, brown lake; yellow lake; buckthorn lake; Persian lake; English pink; Italian pink; brown pink; sap green
Physical and Chemical Properties
- Stil de grain has poor lightfastness
Resources and Citations
- R. J. Gettens, G.L. Stout, Painting Materials, A Short Encyclopaedia, Dover Publications, New York, 1966
- Ralph Mayer, A Dictionary of Art Terms and Techniques, Harper and Row Publishers, New York, 1969 (also 1945 printing)
- R.D. Harley, Artists' Pigments c. 1600-1835, Butterworth Scientific, London, 1982
- Dictionary of Building Preservation, Ward Bucher, ed., John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York City, 1996
- Art and Architecture Thesaurus Online, http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabulary/aat/, J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles, 2000
- Wikipedia: Stil de grain yellow Accessed March 2026 (has color coordinates for yellow shade for stil de grain)
- ColourLex: Stil de Grain
- CHSOS: Spectra (Reflectance, XRF, Raman, FTIR) for Stil de grain