Blockx artists’ materials
The Blockx Project has recently been initiated by the Centre Euopéen d’Archéométrie to learn more about Blockx, the Belgian paint and color manufacturer and its products. This project relies on the document and material archives that the Blockx company has gathered since its creation in 1865.
An inventory has been made of all the archives present in the Nandrin factory. Even if they were kept in a relative organized state, many were conserved in different places of the factory and the nearby house of Blockx’s heirs which made it difficult to get an overall view of its content. Its potential is evident, containing correspondence, lists of orders from painters and other clients but also recipes books. Most of them have now been digitized.
In addition, there is a large material collection consisting of paint tubes, color charts, raw pigments and binders as liquid amber, which is a Blockx signature. Chemical analysis (which includes XRF, Raman, Hyperspectral imaging and FTIR) will be performed on all these materials.
