A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
gamboge
Gamboge is a deep transparent golden yellow, and the pigment behind it is a gum resin tapped from trees of the genus Garcinia in Southeast Asia. The trees are cut spirally and the resin runs into a hollow bamboo, where it hardens into a cylinder that was traded in that form. It dissolves straight into water, which made it one of the few truly transparent yellows available to watercolor painters before synthetic pigments.
Etymology
The word is the country. Gamboge is an old European form of Cambodia, where the resin was collected and traded from, and the pigment reached Europe through Dutch and Portuguese trade in the seventeenth century carrying the place name with it. Pigments named for where they came from are common: Sienna and umber are Italian towns and an Italian region, and magenta is a battlefield.
Notes
It is the color of the robes of Theravada Buddhist monks in parts of Southeast Asia. JMW Turner used it heavily, and so did the botanical illustrators, who needed a yellow that would not go muddy over another wash. It is toxic and was long used as a purgative in tiny doses, which is one reason nineteenth-century painters were told never to bring a brush to a point in the mouth.