Vintage oil paint tubes - are they safe? What are they worth?

I kind of bought some vintage and antique oil colour tubes.  



It was an accident, I promise.  The thrift shop manager remembers I bought an easel and got the box out from the back of the shop and I know that in the tube, oil paint can stay useable for over 100 years.  There's no way to resist.

My thoughts:  "OH WOW!  These are old enough to be forbidden colours that aren't made anymore and I can finally see what some of my heroes painted with."

Which was quickly followed by, "oh yah, that's right.  Those colours are forbidden because they can absorb through the skin really easily.  Maybe I shouldn't be touching this."

I don't know if these are old enough to contain toxins or not, so I'm going to err on the side of caution.  Gloves and good airflow just in case.  Although there is so little there, I would have to eat the paint and the tubes to build up enough to cause permanent harm, I still don't want a rash.  (don't eat paint)

But are they any good?  Well, many have paint and corrosion on the outside of the tube.  All the ones I tested are soft to a gentle squeeze.  

I'm also seriously considering painting a painting with these vintage colours.  Maybe.  We'll see.  It might be good to find out if the paints have value as I know there are quite a few vintage oil paint collectors in the woodwork.  If I can sell one tube of paint and buy ten more with the money, maybe I don't need to paint with the vintage stuff.

There is something so attractive about finding an old thing and giving it a new life.  A romantic feeling of what if and what was life like back then?  It's hard to explain, but I get the same feeling when finding a still working, 200 year old kitchen gadget.  


The big problem with oil colour tubes is dating them.  If I can find out when they were made, I can get a better idea of what is inside them.  In my wonderings among the internet, I found that there are some pretty weird blog entries on this topic - ones that don't make sense (both with the internal logic and in correspondence to the external world).  These are all dated 2022 and later.  AI hallucinations  make the internet difficult to use.  I wish there was a search engine that could filter out all pre-2022 content.  

However, I did manage to dig up some good stuff.  Comparing it to what I know of history and technology at the different time periods and this chart turned out to be extra-useful for fact checking

Let's start with some of the younger paints.

Reeves Goya line of oil colour vintage paints

Yellow Ochre


Ivory Black


The labels are printed in multi colour.  They appear to be tin or aluminum tubes with plastic caps.  Plastic caps, especially plastic that isn't black, puts this solidly after 1945, probably post 1950 as there were still a lot of supply shortages from the war.

Reeves paint making company, according to wiki, was mulling paints under variations of the "reeves" name from 1766 until 1964 when it was absorbed into a different paint company.  That's a big date range.

However, "Reeves Goya" oil colours made in england, was difficult to figure out.  I did find this trusted source of paint supply history.  And a quick search for Goya on the page gives me:

Reeves advertised in The Year's Art 1884-1904, for example in 1893, ‘Lawrence Phillips’ Sketching Palette, Made only by us, is the most practical invention of the present day’. Later, they advertised regularly in The Artist: the quality of their canvas (March 1934), pastels in 250 tones, giving the Dalston address and that of their associated company in Canada (March 1937); artists' requisites for outdoor sketching (June 1934); also Goya artists’ oil colours, introduced in 1935 (Art Review 1935).

That makes this Reeves Goya paint, cira 1950s or early 1960s due to the plastic cap.

However, this Vandyke Brown oil colour paint tube from Reeves is also from their Goya line (post 1935) and has a metal cap.  The metal cap is in keeping with pictures I saw of a catalogue from about that time.



This dates this metal capped Reeves Goya tube of oil paint between 1935-1950


Conclusion on these three paints:
Ivory black is likely to be a Hue by this time made from carbon minerals or charred bone.  
Yellow ochres is pretty standard since the cave paintings, although this could be synthetic, it's probably still natural.
Vandyke - it's not a colour I know much about.  

Rowney Oil Colours have a long and interesting history.  Founded in the late 1700s, the company had dramatic shifts over the years - from wig making to paints and all sorts of other adventures.

From The Story of Daler-Rowney, we find these interesting dates

1783 start making oil paints
1841-ish, start using lead tubes (like W&N they seem to claim to have invented the paint tube)
1983 - became Daler-Rowney Limited

Elsewhere, I found this picture of their early paint tubes, circa 1840s.





Rowney oil colours French Ultramarine also has the word "georgian" on the label.  This is awesome because we can do a search in out trusted source for British Artist Suppliers and discover

In the late 1940s Rowney’s brought out ‘Georgian’ Oil Colours, a range of inexpensive British-made oil colours for art students, schools and amateurs, which, they claimed, became by far the biggest selling oil colour in Britain (‘Oil Colours’, typescript, c.1973, Rowney Archive). Export figures for 1972 show Georgian Oil Colours outselling Artists Oil Colours, six to one, with New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Sweden and Italy among the best selling markets.

As a side note, the current company still makes oil paints under the Georgian name.

This narrows our date range from late 1940s to 1983, but I wonder if we can whittle this date down a bit more.

Rowney oil paint alizarin crimson



Rowney oil paint chrome yellow



and burnt sienna


These all have plastic caps and each of the cap is a different colour.  The labels are printed in black and one colour.  Very simple, but effective.  

I'm getting a strong 1950s 1960s vibe from these.  I don't know when coloured plastic became cheap enough to use for something like caps, but it feels like it was a thing by 1960.  I'm going to guess and say these tubes of Rowney Georgian oil colours are made between 1960 - 1983.  Probably 1960s

The colours are likely to be akin to modern oil paint of the same name.  Chrome Yellow isn't used much anymore.  Memory says it can interact with some of the colours and make weird browns or something.  

Alizarin is a well known fugitive colour that fades to brown with exposure to light.  Given that this is a student line, the ultramarine is most likely synthetic like the modern stuff.  

I like these metal caps better.  



I wonder what they were made from and if people still make something like that.  It's managed to keep the paints away from oxygen and squishy.

With the metal caps, I have Rowney Georgian oil colours lemon yellow and cobalt blue.  



Metal caps puts it defiantly pre 1955 (when making plastics became much easier) and from our earlier post, we discovered the Georgian line of oil paints starts in the late 1940s.  I'm feeling safe to say these two tubes of Vintage Rowney oil paints come from the early 1950s.

Cobalt is a trace mineral (I buy it for my sheep) but it's also easy to build up too much in one's system.  So basically, don't eat it.

I have no idea what pigments they would have used in Lemon Yellow.  There are so many variations on this colour that it's like saying "chocolate" without saying if there are raisons in there or not.

Let's try dating the Winsor & Newton Student Oil colours.

First thoughts is that the Winsor and Newton student line is currently called Winton.  Although I couldn't find a date of when the name changed.  

This Crimson lake has seen better days.



The poor thing.  The current cap isn't a good fit and it looks like someone had trouble getting it off and wrung the tube until it broke open below the shoulders.  There's got to be a better way to get paint out than that.



Lake is an organic pigment and not lightfast.  It's still one that is popular today for sketchbooks or graphic illustrations (work that will be scanned so doesn't have to last).

This Emerald Green student oil colour by Winsor and Newton has survived much better.



It has the griffin logo which puts this at post 1881



Emerald green is a tricky colour as it was often made with mercury and can off gas as well as absorb through the skin.  Depending on where in the world, Emerald green pigment (sometimes called Paris Green) was banned circa 1900.  W&N imply that it was about this time that the name was changed from Emerald Green to Winsor Emerald.  At that time they switched to safer pigments.  It was also a very cheap (money wise) pigment to produce, so it makes sense it would be in the student line. One would expect to put these paints pre 1900... but...

The tubes say "made in England".  Circa 1945, W&N seem to switched from London to England on their labels.  With the metal caps, this could be anywhere between 1881-1955.  Sadly, the England label makes me feel it's post 1945.  But also good news because the Emerald Green would have been replaced with safer pigments by then and I can use the paint.

One more tube of paint, and my favourite so far.

So far, I feel that all of these vintage oil paints are congruent with 2025 safety standards and with my own, more exacting standards of safety.

That's the paints.  The vintage oil paint tubes are less certain.  It looks like aluminum, lead, and tin are the main metals used in paint tubes.  All three of these are best kept out of the main waste stream.  Most towns have a recycling dropoff for things like light bulbs, batteries, etc.  They are usually happy to accept artist waste like spent paint tubes of any vintage.   Including modern ones.

This was the first tube I saw in the thrift shop and the paint that got me giddy about these old tubes.



Naples yellow by W&N, like so many historic colours, is named after the place it comes from.  Indian Red, Naples Yellow, Sienna... all named after places.  The other historic theme is to name it after a person like Payne's grey or Hooker's green.  

We first see Naples Yellow around the 5th Century when it was mined from natural deposits found in Mount Vesuvius, Naples.  Although other sources suggest variations of this mineral were used elsewhere in the world at least a thousand years before.   By the 1400s they found a way to make it synthetically from Tin and lead or something like that (different sources have different opinions and I'm not keen to make it from scratch, so this is good enough.  depending on how the chemicals are heated, we can get light, dark, and lemon Naples Yellow colour.  It's sort of a pale, yellow, but not.  It's brown and pink and such a complicated colour.  But lightfast and permanent as well as easy to mix.  I can see why it was one of the most popular colours for 500 years of oil painting in Europe.  Or at least, I can see the effects - I've never had the chance to paint with genuine Naples Yellow.

What we do know is that by the middle of the 15th Century (if not before) this was a very popular colour in painting.   And by the 1960s this pigment was no longer easily available (due to health and environmental concerns) and not long after that, most artist paint makers stopped making real Naples Yellow paint.  

Rubleve sells Real Naples Yellow paint and maybe one day I can get my own tube or two.
PY41
Lead Antimonate Yellow  

The different mixes for Naples Yellow Hue are interesting.  Most put titanium white (which is basically a light blue) and yellow together and say it's Naples.  It looks like white mixed with yellow - a kind of pale greenish yellow.  Some makers, however, put Umbers (PBr7) and these seem a bit better.  And yet others, use PBr24 and no white at all.  I'm looking forward to trying some of these.  

But this tube of vintage oil paint is most definitely genuine Naples yellow.  

Metal tube with a gorgeous decorated cap.  



I haven't found a reliable source on the cap decorations yet, but there seem to be a few stages with different decorations on the cap and shoulders.  

This tube has the griffon so that puts it post 1881 and "London" on the label, which puts this pre 1945 (see above for links to sources I used to get these dates).  I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest this is pre-WWI.  Maybe a bit earlier as the arms race caused a shortage of resources like metal.  Partly because of things I saw on the internet, but wasn't able to find primary sources to back it up.  And partly because of the feel of this tube of paint.  It feels like late Victorian/Edwardian technology and aesthetic.  After about 1910, there's far less adornment on packaging as that logo on the lid must cost a pretty penny extra to make.  

Based on that, 1881-1910 would be my date for this tube of Winsor and Newton Naples Yellow oil paint.  Officially an antique.

And very soft to squeeze.  I suspect the paint inside is useable and I'm tempted to (with caution) open it up and swatch out a sample.  

Maybe.

I want to try a few other things first.