History of the earliest painting

The earliest known paintings, representing animals hunted for food, were made by Stone Age artists on the walls if caves of Lascaux, in France, around 25,000 BC. The cave contains nearly 2,000 figures. Over 900 can be identified as animals.

Plato an Athenian philosopher, who lived four centuries before the Christian Era, informs that painting had been practiced by the Egyptians for ten thousand years.

The oldest pictures in Egypt and therefore in the world, are on the walls of the grotto of Benihassan; they were executed in the reign of Osortesen I.

According to Pliny the Egyptians had been masters of painting full six thousand years before it passed from them to the Greeks.

The first colors were such naturally occurring pigments as red made from iron oxide, yellow and brown from clay ochre, and black from soot. It was not until 3000 BC that blue and green were obtained by grinding up lapis lazuli and malachite.

The earliest known European oil paintings are a series of late thirteenth-century Norwegian altar frontals. 

There are some indications that these actually may have been painted with a mixture of drying oil and egg yolk. Analytical work suggests that linseed oil was the common oil in these early oil paintings.

The first synthetic pigments were developed after a British chemist, William Perkin, discovered a dye called mauveine. The first truly synthetic medium, based on coal tar, was develop in Germany towards the end of the 19th century.
History of the earliest painting