In landscapes by Joachim Patinir, Pieter Bruegel and their successors, the world at the horizon often shifts towards a remarkable blue-green. This was not simply the result of a preference for a particular pigment. It was a way of painting distance, constructed through colour, tone, different pigments and, in some cases, centuries of material change.
In Joachim Patinir’s Landscape with Charon Crossing the Styx, an almost improbably blue-green world stretches between the viewer and the horizon. Water occupies the centre of the panel. To the left, the banks become darker and greener, while farther away the ridges dissolve into increasingly cool shades of blue. Charon’s boat is small enough to make the scale of the landscape appear even greater.
Painted around 1520–1524 and now in the Museo Nacional del Prado, the picture suggests a space extending for many miles.[1] Variations on the same effect recur throughout the painting of the Low Countries. Landscapes often begin close to the viewer with browns, dark greens and strong contrasts. As the eye travels farther into the scene, details diminish, contrasts soften and the palette shifts towards green, blue-green, blue and, at times, an almost blue-grey.
For anyone particularly sensitive to colour, that transition can be irresistible. But the more interesting question is not why a painter was so fond of blue-green, but why distance became blue-green.
A colour that creates space
The phenomenon has a name: aerial or atmospheric perspective. Colour tells us where the foreground ends and distance begins.
When we look across a vast landscape, objects do not simply become smaller with distance. Colour and contrast also change. Distant mountains appear less sharply defined than a tree twenty metres away. Shadows and highlights move closer together in tonal value, while the atmosphere between viewer and object alters our perception of colour.
A painter can imitate this effect without relying on a single vanishing point or an elaborate geometrical construction. Aerial perspective creates spatial depth through gradual changes in colour and tone.[2] That is important, because Patinir’s blue distance did not suddenly appear around 1520.
Already in fifteenth-century Early Netherlandish painting, distant hills and mountains become cooler and bluer. Blue-tinged mountains on the far horizon form part of the extraordinary spatial persuasiveness of this tradition.[3] With Patinir, however, the distant landscape almost becomes a protagonist in its own right.
Patinir and the discovery of the panorama
Joachim Patinir was born around 1480 in Dinant and later worked in Antwerp, where he died in 1524. His paintings are among the earliest Northern European works in which landscape becomes so dominant that the religious figures can seem almost absorbed by their surroundings.
In many earlier paintings, landscape functions primarily as setting: a town behind the Virgin, a river behind a saint, a mountain range behind a Crucifixion. With Patinir, the organisation of the landscape itself becomes a major pictorial problem. How do you suggest many miles of space on a wooden panel? One of his most effective tools was colour.
Consider Landscape with Charon Crossing the Styx. Patinir divides the painting vertically into three zones, with the broad river occupying the centre.[1] Yet there is also a second, less literal structure: the progression from near to far. Dark greens hold the nearest vegetation optically in the foreground. Beyond it, the landscape becomes lighter. The water moves between green and blue. The mountains at the horizon become cooler and gradually lose their sense of material solidity.
The paint creates distance before the viewer has consciously identified how the effect is achieved. That is what makes these landscapes so compelling. The blue-green is not simply a colour field that happens to work well alongside brown. It forms part of a spatial system.
Brown, green, blue
During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this system becomes increasingly recognisable. A painter might keep the foreground warm and brownish, make the middle distance greener and allow the farthest zone to dissolve into blue. These three colours should not be understood as a rigid formula. Not every landscape is divided into three neat bands, and painters did not all use the same hues. Warmth, darkness and contrast bring elements forward. Cooler, lighter colours help them recede.
Jan Brueghel the Elder demonstrates this beautifully in Landscape with Travellers and Peasants on a Track of 1610. The brownish hill in the foreground gives way to green woodland on the far side of the water, after which the greens dissolve into misty blues and greys in the great distance.[4] Once you have consciously noticed this progression, you begin to recognise it everywhere.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder also plays with similar relationships. In The Harvesters of 1565, now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the foreground is dominated by saturated yellows, warm earth tones and the dark mass of a tree. Beyond them, greener and cooler zones open towards the water and horizon.[5]
But what did painters use to make blue-green?
This is where the subject becomes materially more complex. It would be tempting to search for a single historical pigment and proclaim it “the Flemish blue-green”. Technical research into fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Netherlandish paintings instead reveals considerable variation in the materials used.
Among the blue pigments identified in fifteenth-century paintings are azurite and ultramarine, while verdigris played an important role in green passages.[6] Green could also be produced by mixing blue and yellow pigments, for example azurite with lead-tin yellow. Painters could furthermore build up different layers: an opaque green underpaint, for instance, followed by a more transparent glaze.
This is crucial to understanding historical colour. A paint sample is not the equivalent of a modern colour code. What appears at the surface as a single blue-green hue may in fact be the optical result of several pigments, differing layer thicknesses, additions of white, a transparent upper layer and the colour of the paint beneath.
The materials available to painters also changed over time. In sixteenth-century works, a blue pigment becomes increasingly important that was scarcely encountered in the fifteenth-century paintings included in the same research: smalt. Smalt is finely ground cobalt-coloured glass, and during the sixteenth century it became an increasingly significant part of the European painter’s palette.[6]
Is the blue-green we see today still original?
This brings us to a complication that is easily forgotten when looking at Old Master paintings. Oils, pigments, transparent layers, restoration materials and varnishes can all change over the course of five centuries. Sometimes the changes are subtle; sometimes they are considerable.
Smalt is a clear example. The pigment can degrade and lose much of its blue colour, appearing grey rather than blue or purplish.[6] But materials above the paint layer can also alter our perception of colour. Traditional natural-resin varnishes can yellow with age. Place an optically transparent yellow layer over blue and the perceived colour shifts towards green.[7]
Azurite can, under certain circumstances, undergo chemical alteration into greener copper compounds, although such behaviour depends strongly on the material environment in which the pigment is found.[8]
What collectors can learn from this
For connoisseurship, these distinctions matter. A beautiful blue-green distance may be entirely consistent with a sixteenth-century Netherlandish or Flemish landscape. It may even be characteristic of a particular pictorial tradition.
But colour alone proves nothing about authenticity. Nor does the presence of a historically appropriate pigment establish authorship. Azurite was used for centuries. Verdigris was not exclusive to any one workshop. Even materials entirely compatible with a given period do not automatically make a painting a work by Patinir, Bruegel or De Momper.
What matters more is the relationship between the different elements. How is colour being used? As the landscape recedes, do hue, contrast, detail and sharpness all change together? Are the transitions integral to the spatial construction, or do they sit across the composition as disconnected bands of colour?
Not colour, but distance
What is remarkable about Landscape with Charon Crossing the Styx is ultimately not simply that the water is such a beautiful blue-green. It is that colour forms part of a larger optical progression: from near to far, from brown to green and from green to blue.
Patinir and the painters working around and after him did not discover a distinctively “Flemish turquoise”. They developed and refined a form of painting in which colour became a means of organising immense space on a relatively small surface.
Ultimately, when looking at a landscape of this kind, the question is therefore not simply which colour we are seeing, but: how did the painter make that colour appear so far away?
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Notes and sources
[1] Museo Nacional del Prado, “Charon crossing the Styx”, Joachim Patinir, 1520–1524, collection entry; oil on panel, 64 × 103 cm, inv. P001616.
[2] The National Gallery, London, “Aerial perspective”.
[3] The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Early Netherlandish Painting”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.
[4] The National Gallery, London, Jan Brueghel the Elder, “Landscape with Travellers and Peasants on a Track”, 1610.
[5] The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters, 1565, oil on oak, 119 × 162 cm, inv. 19.164.
[6] Marika Spring, “New insights into the materials of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Netherlandish paintings in the National Gallery, London”, Heritage Science 5, 40 (2017).
[7] Canadian Conservation Institute, “Condition Reporting – Paintings. Part II: Examination Techniques and a Checklist” and “Know Your Paintings – Structure, Materials and Aspects of Deterioration”.
[8] National Gallery of Art, Washington, “Pigment Alteration and Color Change”, Facture, vol. 7, 2026.