It first made its way to Europe in the early 17th century, courtesy of the East India Company. Taking its name from Camboia, the old name given to Cambodia, gamboge is a sunny, deep-yellow resin, produced from trees in the Garcinia genus, found primarily in South East Asia. It also was known as rattan, wisteria yellow, gummi gatti, and drop gum.
Collecting the pigment was a painstaking business, requiring the tree’s sap to flow slowly through bamboo shoots inserted into the middle layer of its bark and allowing it to drip into a mould. After it has hardened, it was either pulverized into a fine yellow dust or mixed with water to produce a pretty, slightly golden paint. Used in traditional Chinese painting and a favourite of Flemish painters including Rembrandt, it is not very lightfast ie it does not last long and as a result in modern art it has been replaced by synthetic, lightfast “gamboge hue” pigments.
Gamboge has been described as “one of the most efficient diuretics that nature knows—put it accidentally in your mouth and you’ll be in the bathroom all day”, a characteristic that it shares with other plants resonating with a yellow brilliance, such as gourds, unripe pineapple, yellow dock root and yellow flag irises. Clearly it is not something to be trifled with, but even worse it is toxic as the deadly case of Morison’s Vegetable Pills was to show.
James Morison vehemently criticised orthodox medicine, believing that “all maladies arise from impurity of the blood, though they may show themselves under various forms” and that the only successful course of treatment was by purgation of the system. Of course, he had his very own solution, Morison Vegetable Pills, a laxative whose principal ingredient was gamboge along with aloes, jalap, colocynth, cream of tartar, myrrh, and rhubarb, which he began selling in 1825, at the age of 51, claiming that they had cured 35 years of his own “inexpressible suffering”. The system could not be purged enough and it was not uncommon for Morison’s adherents, known as “Hygeists” to prescribe between 15 and twenty pills at the start of an illness.
In the spring of 1836, one of Morison’s adherents was found guilty of manslaughter after he had advised Captain Mackenzie, described as formerly a “stout, healthy man”, to ingest 35 pills to treat a dodgy knee. Of course, the pills were Morison’s Vegetable Pills, the panacea for all known ailments. Mackenzie’s demise was just the tip of the iceberg. According to The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge published in 1838 nearly a dozen people had died after ingesting large doses of Morison’s pills, several cases, like Mackenzie’s ending up in court. The writer noted that “even in the extraordinary annals of quackery it would be difficult to find an instance in which the boldness of ignorance was carried further than in this case.”
Art supply shops continued selling resin-derived gamboge well into the 1980s, that is until it revealed another gruesome secret. An employee of Winsor & Newton was breaking up chunks of the material to sell when he discovered a bullet lodged in one. Soon he and his colleagues found dozens of bullets. This particular batch, it was concluded, must have come from a Khmer Rouge killing ground and the bullets would have sped through the grove and stuck in the gummy substance. It was a discovery that put off even the most determined artist.
Brilliant and vibrant a colour as gamboge might be, it comes with a deadly legacy.
windowthroughtime 