We took every one of the 193,155 public-domain artworks in the archive and mapped its full palette onto 10 colour families. The result is not balanced. It leans, heavily, toward warmth — the saffrons, umbers and ochres of pre-modern painting — while the cool blues and greens we now think of as "painterly" turn out to be comparatively rare. This is a portrait of pigment economics as much as taste.
- 193,155works analysed
- 10colour families
- 70.6%of works show saffron
- 90%of colour appearances are warm
One thing to read carefully before the numbers: a single painting belongs to every colour family present in its palette. A canvas with a blue sky and a red cloak counts under both cerulean and crimson. So the percentages below are membership rates — the share of works in which a colour appears — and they deliberately sum to more than 100%. "Saffron 70%" means saffron shows up in roughly seven of every ten works, not that 70% of works are saffron.
The ten colour families, ranked
Ranked by how many works each family appears in. The warm earth tones at the top are present in a majority of the collection; the cool families at the bottom turn up in a few percent at most.
- Saffron 136,352 works appears in 70.6% of works
- Umber 113,525 works appears in 58.8% of works
- Ochre 37,453 works appears in 19.4% of works
- Crimson 16,734 works appears in 8.7% of works
- Cerulean 15,852 works appears in 8.2% of works
- Sage 6,031 works appears in 3.1% of works
- Indigo 5,418 works appears in 2.8% of works
- Forest 4,453 works appears in 2.3% of works
- Rose 1,535 works appears in 0.8% of works
- Twilight 1,006 works appears in 0.5% of works
Browse the archive by colour → · Explore the full palette →
Why warm wins
The dominance of warm colour is not an artefact of how we counted — it is honest art history. For most of the period this archive covers, the colours a painter could actually afford were earth pigments: the ochres, siennas and umbers dug from the ground, cheap, lightfast and abundant. They are the warm spine of nearly every pre-modern palette, used for grounds, flesh, shadow and earth alike. So they appear almost everywhere.
Cool, saturated colour was the opposite — expensive. A deep blue meant ultramarine ground from lapis lazuli, for centuries worth more by weight than gold and reserved for the robes of the Virgin; even after cobalt and synthetic ultramarine arrived, blue stayed a deliberate, sparing choice rather than a default. Bright greens were chemically awkward and often fugitive or toxic. And time itself warms a painting: the natural varnishes used to seal old works yellow and amber as they age, nudging an entire surface a few degrees toward gold. Put together, that is why saffron leads the field, present in 70.6% of works, and why a truly cool, blue-dominant painting remains the exception across five centuries of art.
The palette of public-domain art is warm by economics, not by accident — earth was cheap, blue was costly, and varnish ambers everything it touches. Knowing the bias is the first step to reading against it: every family above links straight into the works themselves, so you can go and find the rare cool canvases the averages hide.
How this was counted
Every figure on this page is computed directly from the Artifact World Gallery
corpus (build 2026-06-19T05Z-d430bcd5b96b) — not estimated. The
archive holds public-domain (CC0) artworks gathered from the open-access collections
of museums worldwide; counts are recomputed each time the collection is rebuilt, so
they reflect the archive as it stands today. Read our editorial
standards for how the collection is sourced and reviewed.
Frequently asked
- What is the most common colour in historical painting?
- Across the archive, warm earth tones dominate: saffron (warm amber and golden orange) is the most common colour family, appearing in well over 100,000 works, followed by umber and ochre. Cool blues and greens are far rarer.
- Why are warm colours so dominant in public-domain art?
- Most of the collection is pre-20th-century European painting, built on earth pigments, varnish that ambers with age, and warm ground layers. Cool, saturated blues (from costly pigments like ultramarine) and bright greens were historically expensive and used sparingly.
- How is an artwork assigned to a colour family?
- Each artwork’s full colour palette is mapped onto ten curated hue families by hue angle. A work can belong to several families at once — a painting with a blue sky and a red cloak counts under both cerulean and crimson.