In his rugged hands, Kempenaar holds a block of the famous blue pigment favored by a Dutch master.
“Here we have a blue king. It’s a half diamond from Chile or Afghanistan. You’re talking about lapis lazuli, the kind used by Johannes Vermeer,” he said.
“Vermeer had the money – he could pay for it. At the time, it was worth its weight in gold”.
Dozens of pigments made at De Cat are neatly stacked on the shelves – terre verte or “green earth” from Verona, dark amber from Cyprus and carmine red made from grinding female cochineal insects from the Canary Islands.
“We grind pigments here the old fashioned way. That’s why people come from all over the world to buy from us. It’s unique,” Kempenaar said.
“And it hasn’t changed in almost 400 years.”
Art experts say that many of the pigments used by Dutch masters such as Vermeer and Rembrandt almost certainly came from the “dye mills” dotted around the Dutch landscape at the time.
It contains precious lapis lazuli which produced the ultramarine blue paint for Vermeer’s famous work The Milkmaid’s apron.
Experts say that De Kat is the last link to the original way of making paint before the process was industrialized around 1850.