Winsor & Newton Quietly Swapped Viridian, and Painters Lost a Behavior

♦ ♦ ♦ JUNE 01, 2026 | 4 MIN READ Winsor & Newton Quietly Swapped Viridian, and Painters Lost a Behavior At a Glance Winsor & Newton has quietly replaced genuine Viridian with a phthalo "Hue." It matches the color on the chip and loses almost everything a painter actually reached for it. A thin veil of old viridian over a warm underpainting does something almost no other green can: it cools and recedes without shouting. Transparent, a little bluish, weak in a mix. That weakness is the reason it sat on so many palettes for a century. Rose Autumn’s May 17 piece, “The Problem with the new Winsor & Newton Viridian Oil Paint,” is what put me onto the change, and it is worth every painter’s attention. Winsor & Newton has replaced its genuine Viridian, colour number 692, made with PG18 (hydrated chromium oxide), with a “Viridian Hue,” colour 696, built from PG26 and PG7. PG7 is phthalo green. As Rose puts it plainly, “PG7 is phthalo green, a powerful modern synthetic pigment with very high tinting strength.” Same name on the tube. A completely different paint. Why viridian’s weakness was the whole point Here is the thing a chemist sees as a spec sheet and a painter feels in the wrist. Genuine viridian, PG18, is transparent, cool, and low in tinting strength. Drop it into a mixture and it behaves: it tints gently, it stays where it is put, it glazes into a soft atmospheric veil. Its quietness is what makes it useful. For the recession in a landscape, the cool turn in a shadow, for a green that has to sit behind other greens and stay back, the painter wants a pigment that does not fight. Phthalo green, PG7, is the opposite temperament. It is one of the strongest pigments in the box. A speck of it takes over a pile of white. It stains, which means once it is in a mixture it will not lift back out, and it reads cold and synthetic in a way that comes forward in the picture instead of receding. Rose’s landscape point is exact: a phthalo-based green “can easily come forward in the picture plane, when what is needed is recession.” Using less of it does not give viridian back. Strength is not a volume knob. The whole behavior is different. Viridian’s weakness was never a defect. It was the feature. A “Hue” can match the chip and still lose the behavior This is the trap in the word “Hue.” A hue color is formulated to match the masstone, the color squeezed straight from the tube onto white. The new Viridian Hue probably matches the old chip well enough that most buyers will not notice on the shelf. But a painter does not buy a pigment for its chip. We buy it for its undertone, its transparency, its mixing temperament, the way it glazes. Those live in how the pigment behaves thinned and mixed, not in the dab on the cap. Match the chip, lose the behavior. That is the quiet cost of a reformulation, and it is why the pigment code matters more than the name. “Viridian” now points at two different paints. The honest move is to stop trusting the color name