Here are some interesting historical facts about painting:

Paint made its first appearances about 30,000 years ago when cave dwellers used crude paints to decorate the walls of their ancient cave dwellings.

Color in painting dates back 20,000 years with the ancient Egyptians. By 1500 BC, paint making was widely established in Greece. Between 600 BC – 400 AD, the Greeks and Romans introduced varnishes.

Plato made one of the earliest recorded discoveries about color. He discovered that a third color is produced with the mixing of two colors.

In 1700, the first recorded American paint factory was established in Boston by Thomas Child.


The Sherwin-Williams company spent years perfecting a new paint formula. In 1880, they introduced a paint formula that far surpassed the quality of all other paints at that time.

In the 1960s two anthropologists conducted a worldwide study of color naming.

Many languages contained just two color terms, equivalent to white (light) and black (dark). Of 98 languages studied, the highest number of basic color terms was found in English: black, white, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, grey and brown.