Michael Harding has spent his 40th-anniversary year doing something rather good: releasing forty entirely new oil colours, ten at a time, each collection named for a place that shaped the company. The Tunbridge Wells, Whitechapel and Brick Lane selections arrived through the year. Now the fourth and final release lands in the shop — the Brecon Beacons Selection, inspired by the shifting hues of the Welsh mountains.
We've stocked Michael Harding for a long time, and the appeal has never changed: paint made the old way, milled with a high pigment load and no fillers, so the colour behaves on the palette the way you'd hope it would. A new colour in this range isn't a marketing exercise — it's a pigment the mill thinks earns its place.
The ten: Forest Green (No. 250), Cosmic Blue (252), Imperial Purple (253), Corinthian Purple (255), Amber (256), Hansa Yellow Medium (315), Perrindo Maroon (316), Pyrrole Crimson (320), Bismuth Vanadate (413) and Cobalt Blue Deep (517).
A few are worth singling out. Cobalt Blue Deep is the anchor of the set — a true cobalt with real depth, the colour of mountain shadow an hour after sunrise. Bismuth Vanadate is an opaque, high-visibility yellow that's very difficult to mix from anything else on the palette. Hansa Yellow Medium is a transparent, warm yellow that glazes beautifully. And the two purples — Imperial and Corinthian — fill a gap between violet and red-purple that most ranges leave to the painter to mix.
Several of these colours will be familiar to watercolourists — we already stock their watercolour counterparts — but this is their first appearance in oil.
They're available now: individual 40ml tubes across the range, plus the complete Brecon Beacons Set of ten. If you've been waiting for the full forty before committing to a favourite, this is the moment the collection is complete.
