Was it true, as Giorgio Vasari wrote in The Lives of the Artists, that oil painting was invented in the 15th century by Jan van Eyck – he calls him Giovanni da Bruggia – and brought to Italy by Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, who traveled to Flanders to learn the secret of its making? Perhaps.
But it was certainly true that storing pigments mixed with oils remained a problem for artists for centuries. The common practice was to seal unused paints in a pig’s bladder tied with string.
Enter John Goffe Rand, son of a New Hampshire farmer, but also both a portrait painter and an inventor. Hoping to make his fortune, he sailed for England in 1831 “equipped with talent, golden anticipation, hope – and with little else”, a friend said.
There, living in Marylebone, he invented what he called “metal rolls for paint” – what we would call paint tubes. The Smithsonian has an example that it dates to c1832, but Rand didn’t patent his invention until 11 September 1841.
The innovation transformed not just the practicalities of painting but its possibilities. It meant that artists could paint anywhere. “Paints in tubes, being easy to carry, allowed us to work from nature, and nature alone,” Pierre-Auguste Renoir said. “Without paints in tubes there would have been no Cézanne, no Monet, no Sisley or Pisarro, nothing of… Impressionism.”
It little benefitted Rand, however. He lost all his money – and the rights to his invention – on an adaptation of the piano. He and his wife returned home “as poor of purse as when they sailed away”, their friend wrote, unable even to afford the customs duties on their possessions.
This is an extended version of a piece that first appeared in the September 2023 issue of History Today. The image is Claude Monet’s The Cliffs at Etretat, painted in 1885.
Like this? You can read more of Mathew’s History Today Months Past pieces here.
Mathew Lyons 
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