“By the beginning of the nineteenth century it was possible to grind paint mechanically, rather than by hand, as had been the practice hitherto. . . . One result of this was that the nature of paint changed considerably. . . . [M]achine production tended to lead to overgrinding, which meant that the subtle differences between pigments that hand grinding brought out were lost. . . .

Mechanical grinding of paints led to another important development, that of paint in tubes. . . . [T]he mechanized production of paint and its storing in sealable tubes—as opposed to its production by hand—standardized colour, both literally, in that additives such as wax and oil tended to efface the differences between pigments, and conceptually in that it turned colours into a series of discrete, universal signs, “cadmium red”, “magenta” and so on. . . .”

—Charlie Gere, from Art, Time and Technology, 2006.