The Story Behind Peerless Watercolors: From Victorian Photography to Your Sketchbook
By Dalton Scolman
Most watercolor brands do not have a story worth telling. They have a manufacturing date, a founder's name, and a product line. Peerless has something genuinely different: a story that begins in the earliest days of photography, passes through a partnership with one of the most famous companies in American history, and arrives in 2026 with the same formula, the same format, and the same handmade process it started with in 1885.
This is that story.
A World Without Color Photography
To understand why Peerless exists, you have to understand what photography looked like in 1885.
Color photography did not exist yet, not in any practical sense. The first successful color photographic process would not arrive for another two decades. Photographs were black and white, and they would remain black and white as the default for most of the world well into the twentieth century.
This created an obvious gap between the world as people saw it and the world as photography could capture it. A portrait of a family on their front porch, a landscape of a mountain valley, a wedding photograph: all of these came back from the photographer in shades of gray. The color was gone. Professional colorists were employed in studios across Europe, Japan, and the United States to address this problem, carefully applying tints and washes to printed photographs by hand, rebuilding the color that the camera could not capture.
It was painstaking work. The paint had to be thin enough to be transparent, so the photographic detail underneath remained visible. It had to be controllable enough to apply in small, precise areas. And it had to dry reliably, stay stable over time, and not damage the photographic paper beneath.
Most available watercolors of the era were designed for paper, not for the delicate surfaces of photographic prints. They were not ideal tools for the job.
Chaz Nicholson and the Problem He Set Out to Solve
Charles F. Nicholson was a chemist by training and an artistic person by nature. By the early 1880s he had decided that black and white photographs were, as later accounts put it, a little boring when compared to real life, and he thought that his background in chemistry made him uniquely suited to find a solution.
After what one historical account describes as many years of revolutionary chemical research, he developed something new. A watercolor paint in dry sheet form that had never been offered to the public before. He called it Peerless Transparent Watercolors and launched it in 1885 with an original set of 15 colors, packaged in a small booklet that fit in a coat pocket.
The format was the invention. Watercolors had always been sold as liquids, pastes, or compressed solid pans. Nicholson's approach, bonding highly concentrated dye-based pigment to a dry sheet of proprietary paper-based film, was genuinely new. The painter touched a wet brush to the sheet, activated the color, and painted directly from the source. No palette needed. No setup. No tubes to squeeze or pans to scrub. The color was right there, instantly available, in exactly the concentration the painter wanted to use.
His immediate market was photographers and professional colorists. The transparent quality of the paint made it ideal for tinting over photographic prints without obscuring the detail beneath. The portable format meant colorists could carry their full range of colors to any studio, any client, any location.
The photographers loved it. But something unexpected happened, which is often how the most important things happen.
The Artists Who Were Not Supposed to Find It
Watercolor artists started using Peerless paint.
The story as told on the Peerless product pages captures this moment: a watercolor artist got their hands on the little booklet, was amazed by what the highly concentrated, fully transparent paint could do, and shared it with a painter friend, who shared it with another, and so on. The artistic community of the time was looking for exactly this: a paint that was more portable than anything available, more concentrated than standard watercolors, and so transparent that it produced a luminous quality on paper that other paints approached but rarely matched.
The market Nicholson had created for photographers turned out to be a market for artists as well. The two audiences had the same need: a transparent, concentrated, portable paint that delivered vivid results without requiring a full studio setup. The format solved the same problem for both.
Within years of its launch, Peerless Watercolors was trusted by both communities. And the 15 original colors that Nicholson formulated in 1885 remain in the product line today, unchanged.
The Eastman Kodak Connection
In the early 1900s, Charles Nicholson partnered with Eastman Kodak.
Eastman Kodak was at that point the dominant force in American photography, building the technology and the infrastructure that would make photography accessible to ordinary people around the world. The partnership between Nicholson and Kodak was for a specific purpose: to provide a standardized, reliable method for hand-tinting black and white photographic prints.
This was not a minor footnote. It placed Peerless Watercolors at the center of how millions of photographs were colored in the golden era of hand-tinted photography. Between 1900 and 1940, hand-colored photographs were popular wedding gifts, vacation souvenirs, and portrait presents across the Western world. Professional colorists working from studios across the United States used Peerless paints as part of a process that Nicholson and Kodak had helped standardize.
The formula Nicholson created for that collaboration in 1885 has never changed. The same recipes, the same process, the same mineral dyes: these are the foundation of every Peerless sheet made today.
141 Years and Five Owners
After Nicholson, Peerless passed through a series of owners, each of whom maintained the original formula and process. The paints remained handmade in Wisconsin, using the same age-old technique, through changes in ownership, changes in the art world, and changes in photography that eventually made the hand-tinting market irrelevant as color film became affordable and widespread.
The photography market faded. The watercolor artist market did not.
Peerless remained in continuous production because the qualities that made the paint ideal for tinting photographs, its transparency, its concentration, its portability, its immediacy of activation, were also the qualities that made it beloved by painters. Each generation of owners found the same thing: the artists who discovered Peerless tended to keep using it for years.
In 2019, Dalton and Cassie, the fifth owners of the company, bought Peerless from Cassie's aunt. They are, in Dalton's words, the fifth owners of a company that was founded in 1885, which makes them the latest in a line of people who have loved keeping old things in working order. Dalton writes from the porch of a house built in 1902. The paints are still made the same way they were made in 1885.
What Has Changed and What Has Not
Since 1885, Peerless has grown from 15 colors to over 80, including the DryColor sheets available individually, in curated sets, and in the full Prism Pack with all 80 colors. The Liquid Metallics line adds copper, gold, and silver in liquid form. The CMYK Primary Color Set was developed to serve artists specifically interested in the mixing possibilities of transparent subtractive color. Products like the Sidekick brought the portability of the original format into a modern travel palette designed for urban sketchers, journalers, and painters on the move.
The format has not changed. The formula has not changed. The process has not changed.
Every Peerless sheet is still handmade. The dye-based pigment is still bonded to proprietary paper-based film in the same way Nicholson developed in 1885. The sheets still activate instantly when touched by a wet brush. The paint is still fully transparent, still highly concentrated, still non-toxic, and still made in Wisconsin.
The original Complete Edition booklet, which Nicholson first published in 1885, still contains the old English color descriptions and painting tips as originally printed in 1902. Buying a Complete Edition today means holding a physical object whose text has not been updated in over 120 years. That is a relatively rare thing in any industry.
Why the Formula Has Never Changed
This is the question worth sitting with for a moment.
Most art supply companies reformulate their products regularly. Pigments change, binders improve, manufacturing processes evolve. The products available today from major watercolor brands are not the same products that were available fifty years ago.
Peerless paints are the same products that were available 141 years ago.
This is not stubbornness. It is the result of a formula that works so well that changing it would make the product worse. The mineral dye-based formulation that Nicholson developed produces a specific quality of transparency and concentration that synthetic alternatives have not improved on. The dyes do not fade, do not change color when heated, and remain stable on paper for decades. A painter who used Peerless 30 years ago and returns to it today finds the same paint they remember.
One reviewer on a photography supply site described them as an excellent replacement for the old discontinued Spotone product, which was the industry standard for photographic retouching for decades. Another customer wrote that they had used Peerless since 1995 and that the colors were still the same as they had always been. A third described finding sheets from 30 years ago that still performed exactly as expected.
A product that performs the same way after 30 years of storage is doing something right. A formula that has not needed to change in 141 years is something rarer still.
The Community That Grew Around It
One of the qualities that distinguishes Peerless from larger art supply brands is the community that has formed around it over the decades.
Artists who discover Peerless tend to share it. The story that Nicholson probably did not anticipate, of an artist getting hold of the little booklet and sharing it with a painter friend who shared it with another, has been repeating itself ever since. Customer reviews consistently mention discovering the brand through a friend, an instructor, a workshop, or a chance encounter at an art supply store. The brand has never been the largest or the most marketed watercolor on the shelf, but it has built a loyal following through the quality of the experience it delivers.
Dalton and Cassie have continued this community orientation by building the CMYK Color Mixing Community, where artists share recipes and color combinations developed from the four primary colors in the CMYK Primary Color Set. The community recipe book that has grown from this project is a living document of the creative experimentation that Nicholson probably would have recognized from his own years of chemical curiosity in the 1880s.
The Original 1885 Complete Edition is still available, containing the same 15 colors Nicholson developed, in a booklet that reproduces the original text. For painters who want to explore the full range, the Prism Pack contains all 80 current colors. And for anyone who wants to start with a modern, travel-ready format, the Sidekick puts eight colors in a pocket-sized palette that Nicholson, who cared deeply about portability, would probably have appreciated.
Still Handmade, Still in Wisconsin, Still the Same
141 years after Charles F. Nicholson developed his formula in a Victorian-era chemistry lab, every Peerless sheet is still handmade. Still in Wisconsin. Still using the same process. Still the same paint.
That is not a marketing claim. It is the actual situation of a small family-run company that has passed through five sets of hands, each of whom recognized that what they had was worth preserving exactly as they found it.
The world has changed almost beyond recognition since 1885. Photography moved from black and white to color, from film to digital. The hand-tinting industry that Peerless was created for has been gone for decades. The art supply market has been transformed by synthetic pigments, global manufacturing, and brand consolidation.
Peerless has watched all of it from Wisconsin, making the same paint, the same way, for the same reason: because it works.
FAQ
When was Peerless Watercolors founded? Peerless Watercolors was founded in 1885 by chemist Charles F. Nicholson, who developed a dry sheet watercolor format originally designed for hand-tinting black and white photographs. The formula Nicholson created in 1885 has never changed, and the paints are still made using the same handmade process in Wisconsin today.
Who invented Peerless Watercolors? Charles F. Nicholson, a chemist, invented Peerless Watercolors in 1885. He developed the dry sheet format and dye-based mineral pigment formula after years of research into how to create a paint suitable for tinting photographic prints. In the early 1900s he partnered with Eastman Kodak to standardize the hand-tinting process for photography. The formula he developed has not changed since its original creation.
Who owns Peerless Watercolors now? Dalton and Cassie are the current owners, the fifth owners in the company's history since 1885. They purchased the company in 2019 from Cassie's aunt. The company remains family-run and continues to make every paint sheet by hand in Wisconsin using Nicholson's original process.
Are Peerless Watercolors still handmade? Yes. Every Peerless DryColor sheet is still handmade in Wisconsin using the same process that Charles F. Nicholson developed in 1885. The formula, the dye-based mineral pigments, and the proprietary paper-based film have not changed.
Why are Peerless Watercolors so different from other watercolor brands? The format is genuinely unique. Instead of tubes, pans, or liquid bottles, Peerless paint is bonded to dry sheets of proprietary paper-based film. You activate the paint by touching a wet brush to the sheet, which instantly releases highly concentrated, fully transparent color. This format was invented in 1885 and has no direct equivalent in the current art supply market. The concentration, transparency, and portability of the format are the qualities that have kept artists returning to Peerless for over 141 years.