Pliny the Elder, a Roman author, in the first century AD wrote that painters in classical Greece used only four colors: black, white, red and yellow. We don't know if that's true since Egyptians by heating lime, sand and copper into calcium copper silicate, discovered the royal-turquoise pigment Egyptian blue at least as early as 2500 BC. But it is acknowledged that early artists were mostly confined to a small range of pigments they could extract from plants, insects and the ground.

Pigments had been discovered, traded and synthesised throughout recorded history, but with the Industrial Revolution the process accelerated dramatically in the nineteenth century. 

The availability of some pigments shaped the history of art. Paintings of Renaissance artists had a broader range of pigments compared to the prehistoric cave murals and the Medieval paintings and manuscripts. From that time some works remain unfinished because the artist couldn't afford the expensive pigments needed to complete the canvas. For example the clear blue ultramarine had to be bought by the commissioner, that often wrote in written contracts how much of the expensive paints they expected artists to use in the finished work, to avoid that painters would use a cheaper alternative. 

Artists had to work out their compositions to create reliable pigments, which were made by hand or some could also be obtained from specialists. 

In the late nineteenth century artists could really benefit from a ready-made pigments production, also with the invention of collapsible metal paint tubes in 1841. The new colors allowed artists to work with the brightest pigments anyone had ever seen.