The back of my house faces south and so gets baked by the sun.
Accordingly, while the exterior paint on the window trim and doors elsewhere on
house lasts five to seven years on the back of the house it lasts only two. I repaint
the surfaces myself for the same reasons I mow my own lawn: I’m cheap and the
task is within my skill set. I’ve purchased the brown paint. I’ll probably
break out the drop cloths and brushes sometime in the next month. (I didn’t say
I was ambitious.)
The paint purchase raised the question (because why wouldn’t
it?) of how long homeowners have been slathering protective paints on their
walls and trim. It seems like something even ancient Sumerians would have done
but apparently this is not the case. Painters as artists expressed themselves far back in prehistory,
sometimes with stunning results such as in the caves at Lascaux. Yet they
didn’t just paint the walls a monocolor (white, blue, or red, or whatever) in
order to brighten up the cave. Nor were later huts and houses so
decorated. They were left natural mud or brick or wood or whatever the walls
happened to be. By early Greek times colors were sometimes mixed into the
finishing plasters, but those are not house paint in the usual sense. I’m
referring here to private residences, by the way. Public buildings and palaces
received special paint treatment, as did statuary. The stately white marble of
ancient Greek and Roman temples looked quite different back in the day. The
Parthenon, the archetypical stately temple, originally had garishly painted
friezes and architectural elements. It must have been awful. The private homes
of the wealthy in classical times often had elaborate interior murals, but
again that is quite different from simply painting a wall (inside or out) a
solid canary yellow. The reason was the difficulty in ancient times of producing
paint in anything more than small batches using animal blood, charcoal, ochre,
oils, colored clays, minerals, egg whites (really), and various other organic
materials. If you are going to go to all that trouble you might as well do
something more with the end product than smear it on a wall. So, paint was
mostly for art and the ornamentation of public structures. It had to await
better large batch production techniques to be affordable for average
homeowners, which didn’t come along until after 1200 CE. Medieval housepainter guilds
formed about this time to protect their secrets, restrict competition, and keep
up prices – a clear indicator housepainting finally had caught on, particularly
after 1500. Those fun-fearful Puritans, of course, objected: in 17th
century colonial Massachusetts they made colorful paint jobs illegal since they
displayed vanity and frivolity. The non-Puritan colonies were more
experimental. In the 19th century chemistry became more scientific
and paint mixing was largely mechanized. Several major paint producers still in
business today got their start then. Safety and environmental concerns (notably
the removal of lead from housepaints) altered the mixes in the 20th century. I don’t know how the Puritans would have felt about my window
trim. Brown isn’t very colorful really. It is not far off the natural color of
the wood. Somehow I suspect they would have found something objectionable. The
most objectionable paint is inside the house, but it is hidden. The housepainter
(deceased for decades now) who painted my house when it was new had an artistic
streak and a personal quirk. He also hung wallpaper, but he always painted and
signed a mural somewhere in a house before he covered the wall with paper. We
all hope to have an impact beyond our time on earth, and this was his way. He
knew that eventually the wallpaper would be replaced, and his artwork and name
would appear again. So somewhere underneath the grasscloth paper in my living
room is a mural signed by Lenny. I don’t expect ever to see it, but someone
someday probably will. My window trim paint, on the other hand, will need
another coat in only a couple of years.
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