Last updated: · By Stanislav Arnautov · Berlin
Quick answer
Prussian blue is the first synthetic inorganic pigment in Western art history, invented accidentally in Berlin in 1704 by Johann Jacob Diesbach. It reached Japan via Dutch VOC traders through the Dejima trading post c.1820, where it was called Berorin-ai (ベロリン藍, “Berlin blue”). Hokusai adopted it for the Great Wave and the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji from c.1831. Van Gogh used it in the Starry Night (1889) and the Almond Blossom (1890). DeckArts is based in and ships from Berlin — the city that invented the pigment that Hokusai used.
Prussian blue — Berliner Blau in German, Berorin-ai (ベロリン藍) in Japanese, ferric ferrocyanide (Fe₄[Fe(CN)₆]₃) in chemistry — is one of the most consequential single substances in the entire history of art. It was the first synthetic inorganic pigment ever made in Western history. It was not planned. It was not the result of a deliberate research programme. It was an accident in a Berlin workshop in 1704, produced by a dye-maker who was trying to make red and got blue instead. The colour that came out of that accident became the blue of Hokusai’s Great Wave, the blue of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, and the blue of Van Gogh’s Almond Blossom — three of the most widely reproduced and most specifically biographical artworks in the classical tradition available at DeckArts. External references: British Museum — Japanese Woodblock Prints; Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam; Metropolitan Museum of Art — The Great Wave. DeckArts Berlin from ~$140.
The 1704 Berlin Accident: How Prussian Blue Was Invented
In 1704, Johann Jacob Diesbach was a dye-maker working in Berlin, producing pigments and dye materials for the commercial market. He was attempting to make a batch of red carmine lake pigment — a standard commercial colour produced from cochineal (the dried bodies of the scale insect Dactylopius coccus) fixed with an iron compound. The process required potash (potassium carbonate) as the fixing agent. On this particular occasion, Diesbach’s potash had been obtained from a supply that had been previously used by the chemist and alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel — who occupied an adjacent space in the same workshop complex and who had been using the potash in experiments with animal blood and bones, specifically in the production of Dippel’s Oil, an early pharmaceutical preparation made from bone distillation.
The contaminated potash — containing blood salts and organic nitrogen compounds from Dippel’s animal-based work — reacted with the iron compounds in Diesbach’s preparation not to produce the expected red precipitate but to produce a vivid, deep blue precipitate that Diesbach had never seen before. The specific reaction: the cyanide compounds in the organic nitrogen (from the blood) combined with the iron(II) in the vitriol to produce iron(II) hexacyanide, which then oxidised in air to iron(III) hexacyanoferrate(II) — ferric ferrocyanide, Prussian blue. Diesbach had invented, accidentally and without intending to, the first synthetic inorganic pigment in Western art history.
The significance of this is not simply that a new blue pigment had been found. It is that before Prussian blue, the available blue pigments for painters were: ultramarine (lapis lazuli ground and purified, available only from a small number of mines in Afghanistan, which made it the most expensive pigment in Western art — sometimes more expensive than gold by weight); azurite (a copper carbonate mineral, blue but unstable, turning green over time as it reacts with moisture); and smalt (a ground cobalt glass, usable but gritty and uneven in application). All three were either expensive, scarce, unstable, or technically difficult. Prussian blue was cheap, stable, producible in large quantities from common industrial materials, and a deep, saturated, cool blue that was impossible to achieve with any other available material. Within twenty years of its discovery, it had reached every major art centre in Europe.
The exact date of the invention is documented in the correspondence between Diesbach and the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who wrote about a new blue colour being prepared in Berlin in letters dated to 1708 and 1710. The first published scientific account of Prussian blue’s preparation was by Pierre Bouguer in the French Journal des Sçavans in 1724, followed by a more detailed description by John Woodward in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1724. By the mid-1720s, Prussian blue was commercially available throughout Europe.
The Chemistry and Visual Quality of Prussian Blue
Prussian blue’s chemical formula is Fe₄[Fe(CN)₆]₃ — iron(III) hexacyanoferrate(II), a mixed-valence iron complex in which iron in two different oxidation states (+2 and +3) are coordinated by cyanide groups (CN⁻) in a specific crystalline lattice structure. The colour is produced by an intervalence charge transfer: when light hits the Prussian blue crystal, an electron is transferred between the iron(II) and iron(III) ions, absorbing light in the red-orange part of the spectrum (around 680–700 nm) and reflecting the blue-green part (around 400–550 nm). The result is the specific deep, saturated, cool blue that is Prussian blue’s defining visual quality.
Three specific visual properties distinguish Prussian blue from other historical blue pigments and make it particularly valuable for painting and printmaking:
1. Deep saturation and tinting strength. Prussian blue has an extremely high tinting strength — a small quantity of it produces a strong, saturated blue. This is partly why Hokusai’s woodblock prints could achieve such intense, uniform blue fields with a single application: the ink was deeply saturated even in thin applications. The older Japanese blue pigments (indigo, ultramarine from lapis lazuli) could not achieve the same depth and uniformity in the flat-colour woodblock technique.
2. Cool chromatic temperature. Prussian blue is a distinctly cool blue — it has no warm (red or purple) undertones. This contrasts with ultramarine blue (from lapis lazuli), which has a slight warm-violet undertone. The cool quality of Prussian blue is what creates the specific warm-cool chromatic contrast when it is placed against warm yellows (chrome yellow, ochre) or warm neutral grounds (warm white, warm cream). The Great Wave’s Prussian blue wave against the warm cream foam and the warm sky is a precisely calculated warm-cool contrast. The Almond Blossom’s flat Prussian blue sky against the warm white blossoms is the same contrast in botanical form.
3. Compatibility with flat-colour application. Unlike the grinding and preparation complexities of ultramarine or the instability of azurite, Prussian blue can be ground to a fine particle size that produces a smooth, even, flat colour field when applied in oil paint, watercolour, or woodblock ink. This flat-colour compatibility is precisely what made it so transformative in the Japanese woodblock tradition, where the flat-colour convention required an unmodulated colour field without tonal graduation.
One important limitation: Prussian blue can fade in strong, sustained direct sunlight (it is rated ASTM II–III in lightfastness for original painted works). However, for indoor domestic display under standard indirect or artificial lighting conditions, it is stable for generations. The DeckArts UV archival photopolymer inks used to reproduce Prussian-blue compositions (Great Wave, Almond Blossom, Starry Night) have ASTM I lightfastness — 100+ year rated fade resistance — which is higher than the original woodblock prints or oil paintings themselves.
Prussian Blue Spreads Through Europe: 1704–1820
After its accidental discovery in 1704 and its first documented external descriptions in 1724, Prussian blue spread rapidly through the European painting tradition. The key milestones:
1724–1730s: Prussian blue becomes commercially available throughout Europe. Antoine Watteau, the French Rococo painter (1684–1721), is documented as one of the first major painters to use it, in his final works of 1720–1721. The German Baroque painters at the Berlin and Dresden courts adopt it almost immediately after its commercial availability. By the 1730s, it is in use in France, England, Italy, and the Netherlands.
1740s–1780s: Canaletto (Venice), Gainsborough (England), and Hogarth (England) all use Prussian blue in their work. The English portrait tradition of the mid-18th century uses it extensively for sky backgrounds. It becomes one of the standard palette blues alongside lead white, vermilion, yellow ochre, and lamp black.
1790s–1820s: William Turner (England) and Eugène Delacroix (France) both use Prussian blue prominently in their work. For Turner, it contributes to the specific quality of his atmospheric skies. For Delacroix, it is an essential component of the colour theory he developed (the interaction between warm and cool colours in shadow and light) that directly influenced the Impressionist movement. John Constable’s sky studies of the 1820s use Prussian blue mixed with lead white for the specific cool grey-blue of overcast English sky conditions.
1780s–1830s: The pigment reaches Asia through multiple trade routes. It arrives in China in the late 18th century through European Jesuit missionaries and through Canton trade routes. It arrives in Japan through the Dejima trading post in the 1820s. Both adoptions produce major artistic consequences: in China, Prussian blue influences the blue-on-white ceramic painting tradition; in Japan, it transforms the woodblock print tradition in the hands of Hokusai.
How Prussian Blue Reached Japan: VOC, Dejima, and Berorin-ai
Japan’s Sakoku period — the policy of national closure and isolation that lasted from 1635 to 1853 — permitted only one point of contact with the Western world: the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC) trading post at Dejima (De Japonsche Comptoir), an artificial island in Nagasaki harbour that the VOC operated under strict Japanese government regulation. The Dejima trading post was a rectangle of reclaimed land approximately 120 metres long and 75 metres wide, connected to the mainland Nagasaki shoreline by a single guarded bridge. Dutch traders were permitted to reside on Dejima; they could not leave the island without official escort; Japanese people could not enter Dejima without official permission. All goods, all knowledge, and all Western influence that entered Japan during the 218-year Sakoku period passed through this single island.
Prussian blue reached Dejima through VOC commercial trade in approximately the 1820s. The exact date of the first Dejima shipment of Prussian blue is not precisely documented; the first Japanese paintings confirmed to use it are from approximately 1820–1825. The specific route: the VOC traded the pigment as a commercial dye material (it was used not only in paint but in textile dyeing, where its cool blue was valued for indigo substitution). In Japan, the pigment was named Berorin-ai (ベロリン藍 or ベロリン衩, “Berlin blue” or “Berlin indigo”, sometimes also written ベルリン藍), directly transliterating the German and Dutch name Berliner Blau. The name is significant: the Japanese name for the pigment is literally and transparently “Berlin blue” — the Japanese artists who adopted it knew exactly where it came from.
The adoption of Prussian blue in Japanese art was not immediate or uniform. The existing Japanese blue pigments — indigo (ai, from the plant Polygonum tinctorium), ultramarine from lapis lazuli (temporarily imported), and azurite — had established positions in the palette. But for the woodblock print tradition specifically, Prussian blue offered something none of the others could: a deep, flat, uniformly saturated blue that could be applied in a single pass of the woodblock in a consistent, ungraduated field. The woodblock print convention of flat colour — the absence of modelling, shadow, or tonal graduation within a colour field — required a pigment that would spread evenly and saturate deeply in a single application. Prussian blue, with its high tinting strength and fine particle size, did exactly this. Within a decade of its arrival at Dejima, it had transformed the colour palette of the major woodblock print studios in Edo (now Tokyo).
Hokusai and the Great Wave: The Berlin Pigment in the Japanese Tradition
Katsushika Hokusai (c.1760–1849) was approximately 70 years old when he began the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji series (Fugaku Sanjūrokkei) in approximately 1830–1831. He had already produced tens of thousands of images across seven decades of work — manga (sketchbooks), surimono (private prints), book illustrations, and single-sheet prints in every genre of the ukiyo-e tradition. The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji was a commercial series produced for the publisher Nishimuraya Yohachi (Eijudō), depicting Mount Fuji from different positions and in different weather conditions, many of them from the sea or from positions across the Tokaido road between Edo and Kyoto.
Hokusai’s adoption of Prussian blue (Berorin-ai) for this series was the decisive creative decision that produced the specific visual identity for which the series — and Hokusai himself — is most widely known. The Great Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa-oki nami-ura, c.1831) uses Prussian blue for the wave itself, the sky, and the water. The blue is flat, unmodulated, deeply saturated: the woodblock’s conventional single-colour-field application applied to a blue that could achieve this specific quality. The warm cream foam caps, the warm cream boat crews, and the distant ochre-toned Mount Fuji emerge from the Prussian blue field as warm events from a cool dominant — the most specific warm-cool chromatic event in the Japanese print tradition.
The second most famous print in the Thirty-Six Views series, Fine Wind, Clear Morning (the Red Fuji, Gaifu kaisei, c.1831), uses the same Prussian blue for the sky behind the russet-red mountain, creating the most dramatically bold warm-cool contrast in the series: the warm red-orange volcanic cone from the cool deep blue sky. Both prints are now widely considered to be among the defining masterworks of the Japanese visual tradition, and both exist specifically because Prussian blue — invented in Berlin in 1704 — arrived in Japan in the 1820s in sufficient quantity and quality for Hokusai to use it in large-scale commercial woodblock production.
Hokusai produced approximately 30,000 works across a career of more than 70 active years. He changed his name approximately 30 times and moved house approximately 93 times. On his deathbed at approximately 88 years old, he said (according to his biographer): “If heaven had only granted me five more years, I could have become a really great painter.” He died in 1849 without having seen or imagined the global cultural consequence of the Berlin pigment in his wave. See: Hokusai: 30,000 Works, Five More Years at 88; Metropolitan Museum of Art — The Great Wave. View Great Wave at DeckArts →
Japonisme: Prussian Blue and the Impressionist Revolution
In the 1850s and 1860s, Japanese woodblock prints began reaching Europe in large quantities for the first time — initially as packing material for fragile Japanese goods exported to Europe, later as collected objects that Parisian artists and intellectuals actively sought out. The specific event that is most often cited as the beginning of Japonisme in French art: the opening of the shop La Porte Chinoise on the Rue de Rivoli in Paris in 1862, which sold Japanese objects including ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Within months of its opening, the shop’s customers included Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, James McNeill Whistler, and Henri Fantin-Latour.
The French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters were specifically interested in the formal qualities of ukiyo-e that differed most sharply from the Western academic tradition: the flat, unmodulated colour fields; the radical compositional cropping (figures cut off at the picture edge in ways Western academic composition prohibited); the asymmetric arrangement; and the specific quality of the colour relationships — particularly the warm-cool chromatic contrasts in compositions dominated by Prussian blue and warm yellow or orange. Monet collected over 200 Japanese prints, which are now on display at his house in Giverny. He specifically cited the flat-colour convention and the compositional cropping as the two most transformative Japanese influences on his own work.
Van Gogh was perhaps the most specific and most documentable in his Japanese influence. He wrote to Theo: “All my work is founded on Japanese art.” He made direct oil-paint copies of two Hiroshige prints (Sudden Shower over Shin-Ohashi Bridge and Plum Park in Kameido) in 1887, translating the woodblock convention’s flat colours directly into oil paint. The specific convention he adopted from Japanese prints for the Almond Blossom — the flat Prussian blue sky against which the white blossoms are silhouetted, without any modelling, shadow, or atmospheric perspective — is a direct application of the ukiyo-e convention, which itself used the Berlin-invented Prussian blue. The transmission is complete: Berlin (1704) → Japan (c.1820) → Paris (1860s) → Arles and Saint-Rémy (1888–1890). See: Van Gogh Letters — vangoghletters.org.
Van Gogh and Prussian Blue: The Starry Night and the Almond Blossom
Van Gogh used Prussian blue in two of his most celebrated and most specifically biographical works at DeckArts:
The Starry Night (June 1889, MoMA New York). Painted from the barred window of the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, in the one-year period of voluntary confinement following the crisis that led to the self-injury in December 1888 in Arles. The dominant blue of the swirling sky — the specific deep, saturated, cool blue of the night field against which the chrome yellow stars emerge — is Prussian blue. The chrome yellow of the stars and the warm cream of the village below create the specific warm-cool complementary contrast that is the Starry Night’s defining chromatic programme: warm yellow from cool blue. The Kolmogorov turbulence in the swirling pattern — the mathematical pattern of fluid turbulence as described by Andrei Kolmogorov’s 1941 equations — was confirmed in the Prussian blue sky by Mexican physicists in a 2006 study. Van Gogh painted Kolmogorov-scale turbulence, mathematically correctly, 52 years before Kolmogorov’s paper. See: Starry Night: Complete Guide. MoMA New York — The Starry Night.
Almond Blossom (February 1890, Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam). Painted in February 1890 at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum, as a gift for the newborn son of Van Gogh’s brother Theo and Theo’s wife Jo Bonger — named Vincent Willem after his uncle. Van Gogh specifically adopted the Japanese woodblock convention for the composition: white blossoms on dark branches, silhouetted against a flat Prussian blue sky, viewed from directly below, with no atmospheric perspective, no modelling, and no shadow. The flat Prussian blue sky is the most specific reference in all of Van Gogh’s work to the Japanese ukiyo-e tradition — specifically to Hiroshige’s plum blossom prints, which also use Prussian blue for flat sky backgrounds. The nephew Vincent Willem van Gogh later founded the Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam in 1973, with the Almond Blossom at its core. The most complete transmission: Berlin (1704) → Dejima (c.1820) → Hiroshige (1840s) → Van Gogh (1890) → the nephew’s museum (1973).
Van Gogh used Prussian blue in additional works of his Saint-Rémy and Auvers periods, including various landscape and sky paintings. Its cool, deep quality corresponded specifically to the emotional register he sought in the asylum period: a blue that was not warm or consoling but vast, cool, and specifically other than the human warmth of chrome yellow or warm ochre. The chromatic opposition between cool Prussian blue and warm chrome yellow — the specific palette of the Starry Night — is the most specific colour programme in all of Post-Impressionist art, and it was made possible by a Berlin dye-maker’s accidental reaction in 1704.
Berlin: The City That Invented the Pigment
The specific biographical connection at DeckArts has three layers:
Layer 1: The pigment was invented in Berlin. Johann Jacob Diesbach’s workshop was in Berlin in 1704. The city was the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia under Friedrich I, who had just been crowned in 1701. The pigment was named Berliner Blau (Prussian blue) after the city and kingdom. The name is both chemical and political: a Prussian blue is a Berlin blue.
Layer 2: The pigment reached Japan from Berlin via the Dutch. The VOC traded it as Berliner Blau; the Japanese transliterated the name as Berorin-ai. Every Japanese artist who used the pigment — Hokusai, Hiroshige, Kuniyoshi, and the entire Edo woodblock tradition of the 1830s–1850s — knew it as a Berlin material. The Great Wave’s blue is named Berlin blue in Japanese.
Layer 3: DeckArts is in Berlin. The Great Wave diptych (~$230), the Almond Blossom single (~$140), and the Starry Night triptych (~$310) at DeckArts are reproductions of works that use a Berlin-invented pigment, produced in Berlin, shipped from Berlin. The material biography of the Great Wave’s blue connects directly to the city from which DeckArts ships. This is not a marketing convenience — it is a specific historical fact.
Prussian Blue in Home Decor: The Cool Event on Warm White
Prussian blue in domestic display creates a specific and unusually versatile chromatic event: a deep, saturated cool blue that advances from warm white, warm cream, and warm grey walls as a single, contained, biographically dense event. Unlike warm-palette art (gold, chrome yellow, warm tenebrism), which requires cool-dark walls (navy, forest green) to advance at maximum contrast, Prussian blue creates its most characteristic effect from warm white walls — the cool blue event from the warm neutral, in the same relationship as the wave from the cream foam caps, the sky from the white blossoms.
The three primary Prussian blue works at DeckArts and their specific domestic programmes:
Great Wave diptych (~$230). The most universally appropriate classical art domestic primary in the DeckArts range. ~45 cm wide: proportionally correct as a primary statement for compact sofas (80–95 cm, 47–56%) or as a secondary statement for standard sofas. On warm white: the wave’s flat Prussian blue creates a single cool event from the warm neutral — the most Japandi-appropriate and most universally appealing classical art primary. Best positions: above the living room compact sofa on warm white; above the kitchen sink on warm white tile (natural water above domestic water); above the bathroom washbasin; above the bedroom desk at 125–145 cm. See: How to Style a Japandi Living Room 2026. View Great Wave Diptych →
Almond Blossom single (~$140). The most botanically specific and most compositionally upward-looking domestic art in the range. On warm white: the flat Prussian blue sky creates a cool botanical canopy above white blossoms — the most calming and most botanically welcoming bedroom and nursery art. Best positions: above the bedroom bed at 165–175 cm on warm white; above the nursery crib (the upward-looking composition was designed for a recumbent position looking upward); above the kitchen side wall as a botanical seasonal accent. See: Wall Art for a Nursery 2026.
Starry Night triptych (~$310). The most dramatically beautiful Prussian blue domestic primary. On navy: the Prussian blue swirling sky partially merges with the navy wall, and only the chrome yellow stars and warm cream village advance from the combined dark — the most specific warm-from-cool event in the range. On warm white: the full composition advances at moderate contrast, readable at room distance. Best positions: above the living room primary sofa on navy feature wall; above the bedroom bed on navy feature wall; as a bold home office Zoom background on navy wall. See: Navy Blue Room Wall Art 2026. View Starry Night Triptych →
Prussian Blue at DeckArts Berlin
| Work | Prussian blue role | Best wall | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Great Wave diptych | Wave, sky, and water — dominant field | Warm white | ~$230 |
| Almond Blossom single | Flat sky background behind blossoms | Warm white | ~$140 |
| Starry Night triptych | Swirling sky — dominant field | Navy or warm white | ~$310 |
FAQ
Where was Prussian blue invented?
Prussian blue (Berliner Blau, ferric ferrocyanide, Fe₄[Fe(CN)₆]₃) was invented in Berlin in 1704 by the dye-maker Johann Jacob Diesbach, accidentally, while attempting to produce a red carmine lake pigment. His potash had been contaminated with animal organic matter from Johann Konrad Dippel’s adjacent workshop, producing an unexpected blue precipitate. It was the first synthetic inorganic pigment in Western art history. The pigment was named Berliner Blau (Prussian blue) after the city and the Kingdom of Prussia. It reached Japan via the Dutch East India Company (VOC) through the Dejima trading post in Nagasaki, c.1820, where it was called Berorin-ai (ベロリン藍, “Berlin blue”). Hokusai adopted it for the Great Wave c.1831. Van Gogh used it in the Starry Night (1889) and the Almond Blossom (1890). DeckArts ships from Berlin. DeckArts Great Wave diptych from ~$230; Almond Blossom single from ~$140; Starry Night triptych from ~$310.
Why did Hokusai use Prussian blue in the Great Wave?
Hokusai adopted Prussian blue (Berorin-ai) for the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji series from c.1831 because it offered a deep, saturated, flat, cool blue that no previous Japanese pigment could provide in the woodblock convention’s flat-colour application. The older Japanese blue pigments (indigo, azurite, ultramarine) could not achieve the same depth, saturation, and uniformity in a single woodblock pass. Prussian blue’s high tinting strength and fine particle size allowed Hokusai to produce the Great Wave’s characteristic deep, flat, uniform cool blue in single-colour field applications — the defining visual quality of the Great Wave. The pigment was invented in Berlin in 1704 and reached Japan through the Dutch VOC trading post at Dejima, Nagasaki, c.1820. Metropolitan Museum of Art — The Great Wave. DeckArts Great Wave diptych from ~$230.
Did Van Gogh know about Prussian blue’s connection to Japan?
Yes. Van Gogh’s letters to Theo document his extensive study of Japanese woodblock prints, his knowledge that they used a specific blue that he associated with the Japanese tradition, and his deliberate adoption of the Japanese flat-colour convention for the Almond Blossom (February 1890). He wrote in letters (available at vangoghletters.org): “All my work is founded on Japanese art.” The Almond Blossom’s flat Prussian blue sky is a direct application of the ukiyo-e convention — specifically Hiroshige’s plum blossom prints, which also used Prussian blue (Berorin-ai) for flat sky backgrounds. The full transmission: Berlin (1704) → Japan (c.1820) → Hiroshige (1840s) → Van Gogh (1890). Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam. DeckArts Almond Blossom single from ~$140.
Article Summary
Prussian blue (Berliner Blau, Fe₄[Fe(CN)₆]₃) is the first synthetic inorganic pigment in Western art history, invented in Berlin in 1704 by Johann Jacob Diesbach accidentally while attempting to produce a red carmine pigment. His contaminated potash — containing organic matter from Johann Konrad Dippel’s adjacent animal-based experiments — reacted with iron compounds to produce an unexpected deep blue precipitate: ferric ferrocyanide, Prussian blue. The pigment spread through European painting in the 1720s–1730s, used by Watteau, Gainsborough, Turner, and Delacroix. It reached Japan via the Dutch East India Company (VOC) through the sole Western trading post at Dejima, Nagasaki, in approximately the 1820s, where it was named Berorin-ai (ベロリン藍, “Berlin blue”). Hokusai adopted it for the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji series from c.1831, using it for the Great Wave’s characteristic deep, flat, saturated cool blue field. The Impressionist and Post-Impressionist movements in France were directly influenced by Japanese prints using Prussian blue through the Japonisme movement of the 1860s onward. Van Gogh — who wrote “All my work is founded on Japanese art” — used Prussian blue in the Starry Night (June 1889, MoMA New York, Kolmogorov turbulence confirmed 2006) and the Almond Blossom (February 1890, Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam, made for his newborn nephew who later founded the museum). DeckArts is based in and ships from Berlin — the city that invented the pigment that Hokusai used, that the Impressionists adopted, and that Van Gogh painted with in an asylum in Provence. The Great Wave diptych (~$230), Almond Blossom single (~$140), and Starry Night triptych (~$310) at DeckArts are the three primary Prussian blue works in the range — all reproduced with ASTM I UV archival inks on Grade-A Canadian maple, from ~$140, shipped from Berlin.
About the Author
Stanislav Arnautov is the founder of DeckArts and a creative director from Ukraine based in Berlin. DeckArts produces classical fine art on Grade-A Canadian maple skateboard decks, shipped from Berlin.
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