Burnt Carmine

This preparation should rather be called 'roasted carmine.' It is obtained by carefully heating the carmine made from cochineal. It possesses a beautiful hue, but is quite as fugitive as the product which yields it. Two years' exposure to sunlight completely destroyed a strong wash of cake-burnt carmine on paper. The moist pigment had lost nine-tenths of its intensity at the end of the same period, while the small residual proportion of the colour had suffered no further change in depth at the end of a further lapse of three years. Burnt carmine is rather less fugitive in oil than in water colour. Experiments in the latter medium gave, after exposure to sunlight, the following residual intensities out of ten:

Moist, after two years: 1
Cake, after two years: 0
Moist, after five years: 1

A sample of burnt carmine purchased of Messrs. Newman about the year 1815 was found (as might have been anticipated) to have retained its colour in the cake perfectly to the present year; but a wash of it on paper possessed no greater nor less degree of permanency than a wash of the same pigment prepared by the same makers in 1886.