Over the following years, other metal salts, including those containing chromium, iron, and tin, were found to be usable in place of alum to give madder-based pigments of various other colors. The resulting madder lake had a less fugitive color and could be used more efficaciously, for example by blending it into a paint.

Most were considered relatively weak and extremely fugitive until 1804, when the English dye maker George Field refined the technique of making a lake from madder by treating it with alum and an alkali. Ideal color was said to come from plants 18 to 28 months old that had been grown in calcareous soil, which is full of lime and typically chalky. Several techniques and recipes developed. The production of a lake pigment from madder seems to have been first invented by the ancient Egyptians. In Spain, madder was introduced and then cultivated by the Moors. It is referred to in the Talmud as well as mentioned in writings by Dioscorides (who referred to it as ἐρυθρόδανον, 'erythródanon'), Hippocrates, and other literary figures, and in artwork where it is referred to as rubio and used in paintings by J. It was also found in ancient Greece (in Corinth), and in Italy in the Baths of Titus and the ruins of Pompeii. Cloth dyed with madder root dye was found in the tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun and on an Egyptian tomb painting from the Graeco-Roman period, diluted with gypsum to produce a pink color. Madder has been cultivated as a dyestuff since antiquity in Central Asia, South Asia, and Egypt, where it was grown as early as 1500 BC.

As a paint, it has been described as a fugitive, transparent, nonstaining, mid valued, moderately dull violet red pigment in tints and medium solutions, darkening to an impermanent, dull magenta red in masstone. Madder lake contains two organic red dyes: alizarin and purpurin. Rose madder (also known as madder) is a red paint made from the pigment madder lake, a traditional lake pigment extracted from the common madder plant Rubia tinctorum. Rubia tinctorum, from whose root the colour is extracted

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