Engraving of a busy painter's studio. At center a master on a low platform paints Saint George and the dragon on a large panel, palette and brushes in hand. At right two assistants grind colors on stone slabs. Around them a painter works on a portrait of a seated woman, apprentices draw, and a boy holds a palette. A Latin caption below credits "Eyckius" with inventing oil color.

Concept · Paint and Its Surface

Oil

Oil paint binds pigment in an oil that dries, usually linseed; it hardens slowly as it takes up oxygen from the air.

Slow drying gives the painter time: colors can be blended on the surface, laid on thick or put on as glazes.

  • Stradanus's print (about 1600) repeats Vasari's legend that Van Eyck invented oil; it was used centuries earlier.
  • Oil then moved south; Giovanni Bellini used it in Venice by the 1460s.

See

Image: The Met Open Access · Public domain (CC0)

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