Hi!

You're essentially asking about the history of chemistry as it applies to art here, and how it intersects with the development of artistic techniques through the years.

First, the chemistry. The earliest colors were basic: charcoal and ochres used on cave walls. These still exist today. You could use berries or other natural dyes like grass juice, but these don't last; ochres, on the other hand, have lasted tens of thousands of years in protected areas. I took this a few years ago in central Australia. It shows a sort of quarry where the indigenous people would dig for different colors of pigments, for use on the rocks and for trade. The site is considered sacred. You can see the variations in the colors; there were also gorgeous white clays as well, very clean. So the first colors people used came from the ground, quite literally, and were entirely natural. They were often mixed with saliva or water to stick them to the rock faces.

Time passes, trade routes open, artistic techniques and materials are sent along with the other goods like food and spices. There's way too much to go into here - each pigment developed has its own chemical development history - but this is a good overview on what was developed, although it does not give a when. Down the bottom of the page you'll note some of the chemicals listed are toxic. For the when, Windsor Newton has a page discussing a broad overview of pigment history.. Note that while the materials for these pigments were traded, quality could vary widely and making the pigments into paints was still done by the individual artists, usually specifically for a painting. To be a painter a few hundred years ago was also to be a chemist.

More time passes, chemistry develops as an industry, and hand-making your pigments in limited batches from scratch as artists of the middle ages did is replaced by reliable, consistent, scientific processes which produce the tubes of paint you see these days. More colors become available, the permanence of the colors is improved, fixative agents improve, and people begin to experiment with the new colors. In the world outside painting, dyes begin to be used with clothing and in plastics which color the man-made world in different shades, concurrent with art showing this new world of color.

If you'd like some more info on this - Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World is an excellent introduction to the history of pigment, through the filter of one specific color.