The Long Desired Medium

Creamy and thick impastos; sheer veils of color; rough, skittering strokes: these are some of the effects that can be created with oil paint. Emerging in Northern Europe in the decades around 1400, this simple yet revolutionary mixture of dry pigments and linseed oil transformed Western painting. In many ways, the history of art in Europe is a history of the unfolding potential of oil to manifest artistic visions.

Despite the centrality of oil painting to Western art no book has yet been devoted to surveying and understanding it over the 600 years of its development. There are excellent studies that focus on specific periods, but because of their narrow scope, they do not explore the dynamics of the evolution of painterly practice.

Drawing on primary texts as well as on numerous specialist studies of individual artists (such as those produced by the Rembrandt Research Project, the Hamilton Kerr Institute, and conservation departments of major museums) this book synthesizes this research with the author's own practical experience working with and recreating historical methods. Beginning with the water-based media in which all the early oil painters were trained, the book explores the vast diversity of applications of the oil medium that proliferated from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries.

A vital part of the account is close examination of individual paintings, made possible through numerous high-resolution photographs from museums in Europe and the United States. For representative paintings the book provides detailed descriptions of how they were made, inviting the reader into the painting process. After reading the book, viewers will be able to recognize pigments, mediums, supports and methods of paint application; they will learn about cracking, fading, darkening, and a host of other changes in the painted surface in order both to imagine the original appearance of a picture and to interpret particular kinds of deterioration as indicators of ho