Impressionists, Landscape Painters and Revolutionaries: How the Tube Has Changed Art
The soft aluminium tube was invented by an artist. It was, in fact, patented in 1841 by the American oil painter John Goffe Rand and was originally made of tin. Those were the years in which a new way of living art was spreading.
Painters came out of academies and studios to paint en plein air. Until that time, the most used solutions to store e transport oil colors were pig bladder sacks, and artists created their own colors, mixing pigments with oil.
Besides being uncomfortable or unreliable, these bladders did not ensure an efficient protection. In contact with air or light, colors altered and rapidly dried out. The tube made of tin invented by Rand provided an efficient barrier against drying out and sunlight.
It was light and allowed to easily transport the already mixed and ready-for-use colors, with no fear of leaks. Soft and collapsible material avoided waste. It is not a surprise that the spread of the tube went hand in hand with the artistic revolution that had swept the world of Art since the second half of the Nineteenth Century: Impressionism. Van Gogh and Cézanne painted their masterpieces with tube oil colors.
Click here to see the first tube patent with its drawings kept in the Archives of American Art.
