Vincent van Gogh’s reds have been turning white, but the exact reason why has remained unclear. Research published last month out of Belgium has identified a rare lead mineral in his paint as the missing link.
As reported this week by Matthew Gunther at the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Chemistry World, a team at the University of Antwerp examined a microscopic sample of van Gogh’s “Wheat Stack Under a Cloudy Sky” (“Heuschober an einem Regentag”) from 1889 at the Kröller-Müller Museum using X-ray powder diffraction tomography, basically focusing beams to reveal crystalline compounds.
