Inside London’s most colourful shop

Illustration by Oscar Ingham

About 150 metres from the British Museum’s gates, a deep green frontage with gold lettering announces L Cornelissen & Son. Through the canted bay window are brushes fanned like feathers, pristine boxes of pastels and easels carrying tubes of paint. Inside, the air is faintly dusty, sweet with shellac and gum; several metres of shelving are given over to pigments in glass jars, stretching from floor to ceiling in chromatic order.

“What makes using raw pigments magical are two things,” says the shop’s owner of 50 years, Nicholas Walt, a genial, softly spoken man now 83. “You can make your own colours at considerably less cost than buying tubes. And then there’s the sheer pleasure of making colour.” This appeal has kept artists and artisans climbing Cornelissen’s step for almost 170 years.

The business began in London’s West End in 1855, founded by Louis Cornelissen, a Flemish lithographer who came to the city via Paris in 1848. At that time, the surrounding streets were dense with engravers, lithographers and publishers. They needed pigments in the tiny quantities that Cornelissen sold – a wash of carmine to touch in a cheek on a mezzotint or a little verdigris to pick out foliage on a copperplate.

Through the late 20th‑century, when art supply shops started to accommodate Letraset, Cornelissen never moved into graphics. By the late 1970s, Walt recalls, it was so comprehensively out of date that when the last Cornelissen in the business died in 1977, larger chains came to “kick the tyres”, but none saw a viable acquisition.

At that point Walt was approached by his friend Stavros Mihilaris, a Greek restorer of Orthodox icons, accustomed to grinding minute quantities of pigment for saints’ robes and haloes. “Stavros took me aside one day and said, ‘Shall we try to save Cornelissen?’” Walt says. The shop had been Mihilaris’s source for rare colours; now he proposed to rebuild it. They reopened in 1979, before relocating to their current premises in 1988. The move was transformative. Visitor numbers to the British Museum were climbing, and some small but vital percentage began to wander down the street.

Today, when you stand before the pigment wall, you’re facing the same raw colours that have travelled from Renaissance ceilings to modern studios. At eye level are rows of dense earth colours – raw and burnt umbers, siennas, ochres; so-called workhorse pigments favoured by Old Masters and Aboriginal communities. On the shelves below sits a jar of whiting: finely ground calcium carbonate, chalk in its most useful form. A few jars along, the pearly granules of rabbit‑skin glue which, when melted and mixed with whiting, forms gesso, the smooth, absorbent ground on which oil gilding and painting depend.

“Broadly speaking, there are two families of pigments,” Walt says. “Those that come out of the earth, and those that are manufactured.” Cornelissen sells both. The earth colours are “the least expensive and the most popular”. The other family – cadmiums, cerulean blue, modern quinacridones and phthalos – are the products of 19th and 20th-century industrial chemistry designed for intensity and permanence.

The industry that produces these substances has been quietly redrawn in recent decades. “The pigment-manufacturing industry has tended to move east,” Walt notes. There was, he remembers, “one lady on the German border who used to make a very nice caput mortuum”, a deep, purplish iron oxide beloved by painters of shadows and drapery. When she stopped, they had to search for an alternative in Armenia.

Lapis lazuli, the most storied of blues, remains mined primarily in Afghanistan’s Sar‑i Sang deposits. Cornelissen’s supplier visits the mines and grades the stone on site, but even then, “it’s very difficult to get clean lapis lazuli”, Walt says. The shop sells three grades according to purity and intensity, at a price per gram that shows why synthetic ultramarine, invented in the 19th century, was once hailed as a miracle.

In a sealed drawer, Cornelissen keeps a cache of genuine Indian yellow. Banned from manufacture since 1908 because of concerns over animal cruelty, it was produced by feeding cows nothing but mango leaves, leaving them close to starvation, and collecting, then evaporating, their urine. “If you take it out and smell, you know that it’s genuine Indian yellow,” Walt says.

Most serious art suppliers now do roughly two‑thirds of their business online and one‑third in-store. Cornelissen is the reverse. And there are things that simply cannot be conveyed through a screen. The spring of a sable brush, the drag of a pastel across paper – these are judgments made by hand and eye in real time. “Sometimes I think we’re not an artist’s material shop; we’re an artisan shop,” Walt says. Pigments are destined not only for painters’ studios, but for the restoration of listed buildings or the colouring of limewash on old farmhouses.

In a central fixture at the back of the shop is what staff refer to as “pastel island”. It was here that Paula Rego would spend hours testing the buttery French Sennelier against the softer German Schmincke, the harder Dutch Rembrandt against Unison’s sticks, hand‑rolled in Northumberland. “We’re lucky to have some well‑known artists as regular clients,” Walt says. “One of them was Lucian Freud. We always had to have 50 boxes of a Daler Rowney oil colour called Naples yellow. When you look at Freud’s paintings, you will immediately see the connection.”

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