Oil Painting
History, Styles of the Oils Medium of Fine Art Painting.
Visual Arts Information

Oil Painting

Oil paints, long accepted by artists as the best medium for fine art painting especially portraits, are made by mixing dry pigments with refined vegetable oil. The oily paste is then thoroughly milled to disperse the pigment colour particles throughout the mixture. The most common type of oil used is linseed, but walnut and poppyseed oils may also be used depending on the sheen, drying time and other effects required by the painter.

The main advantages of oil paints are their flexibility and depth of colour. They can be applied in many different ways, from thin glazes diluted with turpentine to dense thick impasto. Because it is slow to dry, artists can continue working the paint for much longer than other types of paint. This provides greater opportunity for blending and layering. Oils also allow the artist to create greater richness of colour as well as a wide range of tonal transitions and shades. In the hands of Old Masters like Rubens or Rembrandt oils permitted stunning effects of light and colour as well as much greater realism.

Traditional oil painters typically started with a charcoal or chalk drawing over which they built up the paint in layers, taking care to ensure that each layer applied contained a little more oil than the last in order to facilitate drying and prevent flaking. Numerous additives (eg. waxes, resins, varnishes) can be mixed with the paint to vary its luminosity, sheen and other properties like its capacity to conceal brushstrokes. Application methods also vary. Oil paint can be applied to the canvas or panel with almost any implement including a brush, a palette knife, a cloth - even a toothpick. Unlike encaustic, tempera, watercolours or acrylics, oil paint dries by a process of oxidation rather than evaporation, which can take several weeks.

The earliest use of oil paint as a fine-art medium is usually attributed to the Flemish artists Hubert and Jan van Eyck whose painting skills (c.1400-40) convinced first the Dutch then the Venetians and then other Italians that oil was superior to egg tempera. Within 100 years, tempera - the earlier method for panel-painting - had almost disappeared. Thereafter it was employed solely in frescoes, usually in Italy where it was suited to the warm dry climate.

Oil paint duly became the universal medium for for all main forms of easel and studio painting (eg. still life and portrait art) during the High Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, Rococo, Neo-Classical and Impressionism art periods. Indeed, despite an increasing use of watercolours, acrylics, and mixed media, oils remain the favourite medium for most modern artists. Many of the world's most famous paintings have been executed in oils. Examples include: Mona Lisa (1503) by Leonardo da Vinci, Hunters in the Snow (1565) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Laughing Cavalier (1642) by Frans Hals, The Night Watch (1642) by Rembrandt - as well as all his self-portraits, Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650) by Diego Velazquez, Death of Marat (1793) by Jacques-Louis David, The Hay Wain (1821) by John Constable, The Fighting Temeraire (1839) by JMW Turner, Sunrise (1873) by Claude Monet, Sunflowers (1888) by Vincent Van Gogh, Les Demoiselles D'Avignon (1907) by Pablo Picasso, Nighthawks (1942) by Edward Hopper, to name but 12.

• For information about classical painting in Ireland, see: Guide to Irish Fine Art.

• How to Update This Mini Review of Oil Painting.

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