Before the paint tube, paint came in a pig’s bladder. That is not a figure of speech. A painter, or more often his apprentice, ground dry pigment with oil on a slab, tied the mixture up in a small animal bladder, and when he wanted paint he pricked the bladder with a pin and squeezed. The hole could not really be sealed again. The paint skinned over, dried out, and went to waste, and bladders burst in luggage. Painting outdoors was possible — some painters did it — but everything about the materials argued for staying in the studio, where the grinding stone was.
In 1841, an American portrait painter working in London got tired of it and fixed it.
John Goffe Rand was no giant of art history. He painted perfectly respectable portraits and is remembered, where he is remembered at all, for one idea: a collapsible tube made of tin, with a screw cap. Squeeze out what you need, cap it, and the rest stays fresh. He patented it in the United States in 1841 — U.S. Patent No. 2,252 — and the London firm of Winsor & Newton promptly began selling its paints in Rand’s tubes.
That sounds like a packaging improvement, and it was. It was also the difference between painting as a workshop trade and painting as something you could do on a riverbank. Ready-mixed color that traveled in a box, alongside the new portable easels and the railways running out of Paris into the countryside, made it practical to set up in front of the actual scene and finish the picture there, in the changing light, instead of sketching outside and manufacturing the painting indoors later. The Impressionists built an entire method on that practicality.
Honesty requires a footnote: the tube did not invent outdoor painting, and bladders hung on in paint boxes for years afterward. Corot had painted outdoors decades before Rand. What the tube did was make the outdoor method cheap, clean, and repeatable — an industrial product underneath an art revolution.
Renoir understood what had happened. His son Jean, in his 1962 biography of his father, quotes him putting it about as plainly as it can be put: “Without paint in tubes there would have been no Cézanne, no Monet, no Sisley or Pissarro, nothing of what the journalists were later to call Impressionism.”
Rand himself got no rich ending out of it. He put his money into an improved piano, lost it, and died in New York in 1873 — the year before the first Impressionist exhibition. He’s buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. There is a paint tube carved on his gravestone. It seems fair. The man’s most durable work fits in one hand.
Read more
- On Rand’s life and the invention: John Goffe Rand papers, biographical note — Smithsonian Archives of American Art
- On the bladder, the patent, and the gravestone: John Goffe Rand — Linda Hall Library
- On the Renoir quotation and its source: “The Texture of Capitalism” — British Art Studies (Paul Mellon Centre)