Who was the inventor of paints?
Paint has been in use since prehistory. Evidence survives in early cave paintings and the ancient Chinese are considered to have brought its manufacture and use to a state of perfection tens of thousands of years ago; the painted decoration and hieroglyphics of the ancient Egyptians demonstrate later stunning examples. Paint is made up of a pigment, a binder to hold it together and appropriate thinners to make it easy to apply. Before the nineteenth century the word ‘paint’ was only applied to oil-bound types; those bound with glue were called ‘distemper’. A vernacular alternative for farmhouses and cottages was ‘lime wash’ or ‘colour wash’. THE FIRST HUMAN CREATIONS The caves at Lascaux in France were discovered accidentally in 1940. The paintings in those caves are regarded as the most outstanding of all known prehistoric art. The Lascaux caverns had served as subterranean water channels, a few hundred to some 4,000 feet long. Far inside these caverns the hunter-artists engraved and
