Painting palettes
Colour palettes from famous paintings
25 palettes sampled directly from the canvas of public-domain paintings — each with hex codes, WCAG contrast pairs, and CSS or Tailwind export. Every swatch is a colour that genuinely occurs in the work, never an average of two that appears nowhere in it.
What makes these different
Sampled, not eyeballed
Colours are clustered in CIELAB — perceptual space, not RGB — then snapped to the nearest real pixel in the painting. Read the method.
Weighted for what you actually see
Sampling by surface area alone loses the point of a painting: van Gogh's chrome yellow is a rounding error by coverage. Three swatches record the largest areas; three are chosen for intensity.
And honest about drift
7 of these carry published conservation research on the pigments used — and on which colours have measurably changed since. The yellow problem.
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The Starry Night Vincent van Gogh · 1889 -
The Bedroom Vincent van Gogh · 1889 -
Sunflowers Vincent van Gogh · 1888 colour has shifted -
Café Terrace at Night Vincent van Gogh · 1888 -
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte Georges Seurat · 1884–86 colour has shifted -
Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave) Katsushika Hokusai · c. 1831 colour has shifted -
Water Lilies Claude Monet · 1906 -
Impression, Sunrise Claude Monet · 1872 -
Paris Street; Rainy Day Gustave Caillebotte · 1877 -
The Kiss Gustav Klimt · 1907–08 colour has shifted -
The Scream Edvard Munch · 1893 colour has shifted -
Girl with a Pearl Earring Johannes Vermeer · c. 1665 colour has shifted -
The Birth of Venus Sandro Botticelli · c. 1485 -
The Night Watch Rembrandt van Rijn · 1642 -
At the Moulin Rouge Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec · 1892–95 -
The Child's Bath Mary Cassatt · 1893 -
Two Sisters (On the Terrace) Pierre-Auguste Renoir · 1881 -
The Fighting Temeraire J. M. W. Turner · 1839 -
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog Caspar David Friedrich · c. 1818 -
The Garden of Earthly Delights Hieronymus Bosch · c. 1500 -
The Hay Wain John Constable · 1821 -
The Milkmaid Johannes Vermeer · c. 1660 -
Ophelia John Everett Millais · 1851–52 -
The Third of May 1808 Francisco Goya · 1814 -
The Tower of Babel Pieter Bruegel the Elder · 1563
Studio
Paint one yourself
The palettes above came from oil and tempera. These are the materials a copy study is actually made with.
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Kuretake
Gansai Tambi 24 — Art Nouveau
Gansai are traditional Japanese watercolour pans — dense, matte and easy to mix, the closest everyday medium to the flat printed colour Wada's plates were made in. This is the Art Nouveau-themed 'II' edition, a different 24 to the standard set.
Listed on Amazon as Kuretake GANSAI TAMBI Watercolor Paint Set 24 Colors II - Art Nouveau
See price on Amazon -
Kuretake
Gansai Tambi 36
The larger pan set. More range means mixing toward a specific plate rather than approximating it from six colours.
Listed on Amazon as Kuretake GANSAI TAMBI Watercolor Paint Set 36 Colors
See price on Amazon -
140 lb cold press is the weight that takes a wet wash without buckling — the paper most colour studies end up on.
Listed on Amazon as Strathmore 300 Series Tape Bound Watercolor Pad, 140 lb. Cold Press, 11 X 15 inches, White, 12 Sheets (360-111)
See price on Amazon -
Pentel
Fude Touch brush sign pen
A felt brush tip for the labelling and linework around a swatch study — the annotation half of a colour notebook.
Listed on Amazon as Pentel Fude Touch Sign Pen, Black, Felt Pen Like Brush Stroke (SES15C-A) 3 Pieces
See price on Amazon
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Palettes elsewhere on the site
The rest of this archive is built on Sanzo Wada's 1933 Dictionary of Color Combinations — 348 plates from the six-volume Japanese original, plus editorial deep-dives. Browse all palettes or start with the thematic collections.