Oil Painting - Part II [1]Art ResourceMarie-Therese Wisniowski

Preamble
This is the nineteenth post in a new Art Resource series that specifically focuses on techniques used in creating artworks. For your convenience I have listed all the posts in this new series below:
Drawing Art
Painting Art - Part I
Painting Art - Part II
Painting Art - Part III
Painting Art - Part IV
Painting Art - Part V
Painting Art - Part VI
Home-Made Painting Art Materials
Quality in Ready-Made Artists' Supplies - Part I
Quality in Ready-Made Artists' Supplies - Part II
Quality in Ready-Made Artists' Supplies - Part III
Historical Notes on Art - Part I
Historical Notes on Art - Part II
Historical Notes on Art - Part III
Historical Notes on Art - Part IV
Historical Notes on Art - Part V
Tempera Painting
Oil Painting - Part I
Oil Painting - Part II
Oil Painting - Part III
Oil Painting - Part IV
Oil Painting - Part V
Oil Painting - Part VI
Pigments
Classification of Pigments - Part I
Classification of Pigments - Part II
Classification of Pigments - Part III
Pigments for Oil Painting
Pigments for Water Color
Pigments for Tempera Painting
Pigments for Pastel
Japanese Pigments
Pigments for Fresco Painting - Part I
Pigments for Fresco Painting - Part II
Selected Fresco Palette for Permanent Frescoes
Properties of Pigments in Common Use
Blue Pigments - Part I
Blue Pigments - Part II

There have been another one hundred and thirteen posts in a previous Art Resource series that have focused on the following topics:
(i) Units used in dyeing and printing of fabrics;
(ii) Occupational, health & safety issues in an art studio;
(iii) Color theories and color schemes;
(iv) Optical properties of fiber materials;
(v) General properties of fiber polymers and fibers - Part I to Part V;
(vi) Protein fibers;
(vii) Natural and man-made cellulosic fibers;
(viii) Fiber blends and melt spun fibers;
(ix) Fabric construction;
(x) Techniques and woven fibers;
(xi) Basic and figured weaves;
(xii) Pile, woven and knot pile fabrics;
(xiii) Nainkage, durable press and wash-wear finishes;
(xvi) Classification of dyes and dye blends;
(xv) The general theory of printing.

To access any of the above resources, please click on the following link - Units Used in Dyeing and Printing of Fabrics. This link will highlight all of the one hundred and thirteen posts in the previous a are eight data bases on this blogspot, namely, the Glossary of Cultural and Architectural Terms, Timelines of Fabrics, Dyes and Other Stuff, A Fashion Data Base, the Glossary of Colors, Dyes, Inks, Pigments and Resins, the Glossary of Fabrics, Fibers, Finishes, Garments and Yarns, Glossary of Art, Artists, Art Motifs and Art Movements, Glossary of Paper, Photography, Printing, Prints and Publication Terms and the Glossary of Scientific Terms. All data bases in the future will be updated from time-to-time.

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Oil Painting - Part II [1]
During the sixteenth century, the materials and technical procedures of oil painting had become sufficiently developed so that masters of Italian painting were able to exploit its effect to good advantage. During the seventeenth century it was in universal use.

Title: Saint John the Evangelist on Patmos (ca. 1553/1555).
Artist: Titian (painter). Venetian (1488/1490 - 1576 AD).
Medium: Oil on canvas.
Dimensions: Overall: 237.6 x 263 cm; Framed: 265.5 x 290.9 x 10.7 cm.
Credit: Samuel H. Kress Collection.

Various individual masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have been cited as being the first to show the complete adoption of this procedure, but it is hardly reasonable to believe that such definitive statements are accurate when applied to a technique which has had a long gradual development. However, during the seventeenth century, the practice of painting pictures throughout with oils and varnishes increased and finally became common.

Artist: Samuel van Hoogsraten (1627 - 1678). Self portrait.
Size: Panel: 82cm x 62cm; Frame: 108cm x 89cm.
Comment: Van Hoogsraten was a Dutch painter, printmaker, and writer on art. He painted genre scenes in the style of de Hooch and Metsu, and also portraits. He is best known, however, as a specialist in perspective effects, notably in his peep-show boxes, which show a painted toy world viewed through a small opening. Only in his early works can it be detected that he was a pupil of Rembrandt. Hoogsraten visited London, Rome, and Vienna, worked in Amsterdam and The Hague as well as his native Dordrecht, and was a man of many parts. He was an etcher, poet, director of the mint at Dordrecht, and art theorist.

At first the gesso grounds of tempera were used, and, according to most modern investigators, resinous varnishes such as are classified as glaze mediums, were largely mixed with and used in alternate layers with oil paints. After 1600 AD, oil grounds and straight oil colors were almost in universal use. Some painters, believing in the superior luminosity of gesso as a ground for oils, have continued to use it to the present day.

Title: Fiftieth Street Toward Salmon Bay, Ballard.
Artist: Mitchell Albala.
Material: Oil on paper with gold gesso ground.
Size: 8 x 10 inches.

Although one of the advantages of the oil technique is that it can be used on oil-primed canvases of light weight, the more cumbersome wood panels were never entirely discarded; some artists have always preferred their smooth surfaces or superior rigidity.

Title: Woman's head and flowers.
Artist: Goyo Dominguez Acuarela.
Materials: Mixed media on wood panel painting.

The early linseed oil referred to in the previous post on tempera was pressed from flaxseed and purified by heating and sometimes by the action of sunlight. The two principle improvements of the fifteenth century are generally considered to have been the adoption of methods of purification by mixing crude oil with water, which removes the impurities and produces raw oil, and the wider availability and use of volatile thinners.

Linseed oil is pressed from the seeds of the flax plant which is grown in all temperate or cold climates. The seed from each flax-growing region has its own characteristics and is rated in quality accordingly. The impurity which is principally responsible for variations in quality is foreign or weed seed. This is true of any commercial vegetable oil. Sometimes foreign seeds are added deliberately.

Drying oils of the early type had been used from early times as occasional minor additions to painting techniques and for protective and simple decorative purposes. They are mentioned by Galen, a medical writer in the second century, and on through the medieval receipe books and treatise as well as in records and accounts of various decorative projects, but at none of these times were there established standard methods of oil painting as applied to purely artistic work. Standard methods of oil painting has a long history and it is believed by most investigators that it was widely used by artists of the Dutch school during the seventeenth century.

An 18th century engraving of Galen by Georg P. Busch.
Born: AD 129 Pergamon, Asia Minor (now Bergama, İzmir, Turkey).
Died: ca. AD 216 (aged ca. 87).
Fields: Anatomy, Medicine and Philosophy.

Some of the successful and durable effects produced by the great painters of the early days of oil painting have been attributed to the use of mixed resins mixed into oil paint. When resins and resin varnishes were used, the most successful examples probably employed the simple solution or liquid balsam type, rather than the type of resin that rquires cooking in oil with driers and other chemicals.

Though the ancient Mediterranean civilizations of Greece, Rome, and Egypt used vegetable oils, there is little evidence to indicate their use as media in painting. Indeed, linseed oil was not used as a medium because of its tendency to dry very slowly, darken, and crack, unlike mastic and wax (the latter of which was used in encaustic painting).

Most of the early recipes for the use of resins that will not dissolve without being cooked in oil will generally produce solutions which are inferior in permanence to the modern cooked oil and resin varnishes, none of which is considered permanent enough for use in artistic painting.

In general, the experience of the past have been that any considerable additions of resinous materials to oil paints increases their brittleness and that coatings which contain large amounts are definitely inferior to straight oil paints in this respect.

"Madonna con Bambino e Angeli” by Antonello da Messina (XV century; Uffizi Gallery, Florence); (b): layer from which the sample was taken. A modern scientific investigation showed this painting contained presence of the markers of the diterpenic resin of the pinacea family, Venice turpentine: methyl dehydroabietate and methyl 7-oxodehydroabietate.

Reference:
[1] The Artist's Handbook of Materials and Techniques, R. Mayer (ed. E. Smith) 4th Edition, Faber and Faber, London (1981).