Lakes and lake pigments

The name

The word has nothing to do with water. It comes from lac, the red dye from the lac insect of India, by way of medieval Latin and Italian lacca. Painters' red lakes were at first made from lac and from kermes, sometimes recovered from the clippings of dyed cloth. The term then spread to any pigment made from a dye. Lacquer comes from the same root. So the names of a famous class of European paint colours trace back to a Sanskrit word for an insect resin.

How lakes are made and used

The dye is dissolved, and a metal salt such as alum is added with an alkali. A fine jelly-like solid forms and carries the dye down with it. It is filtered, dried and ground. Lakes made on an aluminium base are transparent, which suits a technique called glazing: a thin see-through layer of red lake over an opaque red gives a depth that no single paint can. Venetian painters of the sixteenth century, Titian among them, built the reds of robes and curtains this way, using lakes of kermes, cochineal and madder.

Fading, and lakes today

Because a lake is still a dye at heart, many fade in light. Pinks in some old paintings have turned pale or vanished, changing the balance of the picture. Vincent van Gogh used a bright red lake that has faded badly, so some of his pink and purple passages now look white or blue. Modern lakes are more stable. They are everywhere: the coloured coating on tablets and sweets, the pigment in lipstick and the colour in printing inks are often lakes made from synthetic dyes, listed on labels with the word lake.

Colours on this page

Sources and further reading

• Lake pigment on Wikipedia
• ColourLex: Madder lake
• Webexhibits, Pigments through the Ages: Carmine lake
• Online Etymology Dictionary: lake
• National Gallery, London: Glaze