Pigments on Rural Buildings from South-East Moravia on the Example of the Finding Situation from the Village of Hrušky

The research on pigments used on rural buildings is part of the research on the diversity of colours in vernacular architecture. This is a topic to which the Czech ethnology has not paid much attention yet. The industrial production of pigments, which began to spread especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, offered a broader variety of colours and their easier availability even in the countryside. The case study is primarily based on a material analysis of the finding situation in the village of Hrušky in south-east Moravia (Czech Republic), in the Slovácko region. The research focused on powder paints found in the depository of the Open-Air Museum of Rural Architecture in South-East Moravia in Strážnice in 2020. Unfortunately, the set did not include any building numbers that could help to reconstruct the form of colour development on a particular building. Almost all of the paints, some of which have survived in their original packaging, came from post-war Czechoslovakia. The material included sixteen samples of pig-ments and powder paints. In addition to the description of a particular set of samples, the treatise demonstrates the potential of scientific methods applied to analyse and paints, which are common in materials science and used in restoration works and for ethnological studies.