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Lead-tin yellow is a yellow pigment, of historical importance in oil painting, sometimes called the "Yellow of the Old Masters" because of the frequency with which it was used by those famous painters.
Lead-tin yellow was widely employed in the Renaissance Paintings sorted by historical period, ColourLex by painters such as Titian ( Bacchus and Ariadne),Lucas, A., Plesters, J. 'Titian's "Bacchus and Ariadne"'. National Gallery Technical Bulletin Vol 2, pp 25–47 Giovanni Bellini ( The Feast of the Gods) and Raphael ( Sistine Madonna), and during the Baroque period by Rembrandt ( Belshazzar's Feast),Bomford, D. et al., Art in the making: Rembrandt, New edition, Yale University Press, 2006, pp.110-117 Vermeer ( The Milkmaid),Kühn, H., "A Study of the Pigments and the Grounds used by Jan Vermeer", Reports and Studies in the History of Art, National Gallery of Art (Washington, 1968) and Diego Velázquez ( Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan).
In the early eighteenth century, lead-tin yellow was almost completely replaced in use by Naples yellow. After 1750, no paintings seem to have been made containing the pigment, and its existence was eventually forgotten for reasons that are not entirely clear. Lead-tin yellow was rediscovered in 1941 by the German scientist Richard Jakobi, then-director of the Doerner Institute.Richard Jacobi, 1941, "Über den in der Malerei verwendeten gelben Farbstoff der Alten Meister", Zeitschrift für Angewandte Chemie 54: 28–29 Jakobi called it Blei-Zinn-Gelb; the English "lead-tin yellow" is a literal translation of the German term.
After 1967, Hermann Kühn in a series of studies proved its general use in the traditional oil technique of earlier centuries, coining the distinction between the Type I and Type II varieties.H. Kühn, "Lead-Tin Yellow", 1968, Studies in Conservation 13(1): 7-33
Increased use of other pigments such as the less-opaque Naples yellow may also have displaced lead-tin yellow in common use. During the nineteenth century, after lead-tin yellow had vanished from common use, newer inorganic yellow pigments came into use, such as chrome yellow (lead chromate), cadmium sulfide, and cobalt yellow.
Conjecture about disappearance
One prominent hypothesis for its disappearance from collective memory is confusion with other yellow pigments like massicot. Lead-tin yellow was sometimes called massicot, although it is a different substance. Prior to the development of modern analytical tools allowing for microscopic testing of paint, it was not always possible for art history to distinguish between similar pigments, meaning that most yellow pigment containing lead was generally labeled Naples yellow.
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