palette

palette.
A flat board, usually rectangular, ovoid, or kidney shaped, on which artists arrange their paints ready for use; early examples sometimes had a handle, rather like a table-tennis bat, but a thumb-hole is now standard. Palettes first appeared c.1400; before then individual containers (sometimes shells) were used for mixing colours. For oil painting, mahogany is traditionally considered the best material for palettes, although other close-grained hardwoods have been used. Materials such as porcelain or ivory have been used by watercolour or miniature painters and also sometimes by oil painters—Millais, for example, used a porcelain palette early in his career, when he painted with fastidious detail and wished to avoid muddying his colours.

For many artists, choice of their pigments and the order in which they are arranged on the palette is a very important and personal matter; instructional manuals of the 18th and 19th centuries published much advice on how to ‘set’ a palette, and Baudelaire describes Delacroix placing the pigments on his palette with the fastidious care of a woman arranging a bouquet of flowers. By extension, the term ‘palette’ thus refers to the range of colours characteristic of an artist; Caravaggio has a dark or restricted palette, Monet a bright or rich palette.