Hansa Yellow vs Cadmium Yellow
- Ania Tomicka
- May 22
- 4 min read
I don't work with yellow. My palette has only Yellow Ochre and sometimes Naples Yellow, but it's rare. Since I recently received the Hansa one from Schaal, and I wanted to understand these two pigments properly, I ran a deliberate experiment and wrote down what I found.
I decided to compare the two since multiple sources state that Hansa is the non-toxic equivalent of Cadmium.
Warm, bright, transparent azo pigment (photo by Schaal)
Warm, dense, opaque cadmium sulfide (photo by Schaal)
Where Hansa Yellow comes from
Hansa Yellow is a synthetic organic pigment, part of the azo family, first developed by the German company Hoechst in the early 1900s. The first pigment of the group (PY1) was discovered in 1909 by Hermann Wagner. It was available to artists by around 1915, making it one of the earliest permanent organic yellows ever created. The name comes from the Hanseatic League, the medieval merchant confederation, used as a brand by Hoechst to signal reliability and quality.
It was born as an answer to a problem: the yellows available at the time (chrome yellow, Indian yellow, orpiment) were either toxic, unstable, or both. Hansa offered something cleaner, and it's been a staple of artists' palettes ever since.
And cadmium?
Cadmium yellow (cadmium sulfide) has been part of artists' palettes since the mid-1800s, used by Monet, Cézanne, and Matisse among others. It replaced chrome yellow in many studios because of its stability and intense colour. Dense, opaque, with exceptional lightfastness, it simply does not fade under normal conditions. What it does carry is toxicity. Cadmium is a heavy metal, and while the risk in normal studio use is relatively low, it's enough that its use is increasingly restricted in some countries and debated constantly in artist communities.
How they behave in paint
Hansa Yellow (PY74) | Cadmium Yellow (PY35) |
Transparent to semi-transparent, excellent for glazing and layering | Opaque, covers well, sits solidly on the surface |
Very high tinting strength, a little goes a long way in mixtures | High tinting strength, mixes reliably and predictably |
Brilliant, saturated hue, slightly cooler depending on the variant | Rich, warm hue, a distinctly "golden" quality in many formulations |
Lightfastness: good | Lightfastness: excellent |
Non-toxic | Contains cadmium |
What I actually noticed in the studio
The first thing that surprised me about Hansa was how far it goes. I was used to pigments with a certain density: you put down a quantity and you get a result. With Hansa, I kept overloading my mixes without meaning to. It has an aggressiveness in tinting that I wasn't expecting. Once I adjusted, the greens I got mixing it with a cool blue were genuinely luminous.
Cadmium felt more familiar in the hand, oddly. The opacity gave it a weight I could read intuitively. Mixing it with white produced something warm and almost buttery: I can see why figurative painters who work on skin tones reach for it instinctively. It sits on the surface differently; it doesn't sink or shift in the same way Hansa does over layers.
What I found hardest to evaluate is something that might sound vague: cadmium yellow has a particular density of colour that's difficult to describe technically but easy to see. Whether that's worth the toxicity and the cost is a different question, but I understand now why painters who grew up with it are reluctant to let it go.
What I take away from this
I'm not going to add yellow permanently to my palette, not for now at least. But if I were to use one, it would probably be Hansa, mostly because the transparency interests me more than the opacity for the kind of layering I do. And coming to it without years of habit actually made it easier to read what the pigment was doing, rather than what I expected it to do.
If you're on the fence between the two, I'd say: mix each with the same blue and look at the green you get. Then mix each with white and look at the undertone. The differences will tell you more than any chart, including this one.
Plus, it's really enjoyable to experiment with and mix colors :P
Sources
Liquitex, Yellow Medium Azo. liquitex.com
ColourLex, Arylide Yellow. colourlex.com
CAMEO – Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Hansa Yellow. cameo.mfa.org — citing: B. Berrie & S.Q. Lomax, Azo Pigments: Their History, Synthesis, Properties and Use in Artists' Materials, Studies in the History of Art No. 57, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, 1997.
ColourLex, Cadmium Yellow. colourlex.com
Jackson's Art Blog, Cadmium Yellow: The First Modern Yellow Pigment. jacksonsart.com
Susan Lake & Suzanne Lomax, Arylide (Hansa) Yellow Pigments, in Artists' Pigments, Vol. 4, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2007, pp. 179–222. (Primary academic reference.)