Workshop with Patrick Baty

In the 1980s Patrick Baty, The Paint Detective, produced a range of paint colours based on those offered by a Scottish house-painter in 1807, this sparked off the present wave of historically-themed paint ranges which are still seen today. In April 2000, Homes & Gardens described him as being “Undoubtedly the most influential of our (paint) experts…whose breadth and depth of knowledge is unrivalled”. In recent years, on two separate occasions, he has been employed by ICI (Dulux) and The Little Greene to develop ranges of traditional paint colours for English Heritage. Colour ranges have also been produced for the French and German markets.

The majority of Patrick’s time is now spent as a historic paint consultant, sampling paint layers on buildings, bridges and architectural details to produce a forensic history of the decoration from creation to the present day. He has worked everywhere from Culzean Castle in Ayrshire, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to Queen Charlotte’s Cottage at Kew, and even Tower Bridge. Frequently he is employed purely as an advisor on appropriate paint and colour in buildings of all ages.

For those who want an in depth understanding of historic paint and the use of colour, Patrick is offering a day workshop. The course has 3 parts:

• What paint is and why it was used, sources of pigments, how paint was made and obtained;
• The use of colour c1700-1820 – sources of information, disposition of colour, sheen, the 18th Century colour range and hierarchy of colour, colour aids and decorative conventions;
• The use of colour c1820-1955 – the change in decorative conventions, distemper and development of pigments, Goethe and colour, Werner’s Nomenclature, Lincrusta, graining, British Standard colours and Archrome colours.