Oil Painting

Pigments bound in slow-drying oils such as linseed, the leading medium of European painting from the 15th century onwards.

1,005 works · 10 related artists

About

Oil paint is pigment ground into a drying oil, usually linseed, which hardens slowly as it reacts with air. Colours can be blended wet, layered as transparent glazes or laid on thickly to hold the brush mark. Oils were known in medieval Europe, and scientists have found oil binders in 7th-century Buddhist cave paintings at Bamiyan in Afghanistan, but 15th-century Flemish painters made the medium precise, and in Venice Giorgione and Paolo Veronese opened it up on canvas.

Later generations kept finding new uses. Diego Velázquez suggested lace and armour in a few strokes, and Frans Hals left his quick marks unblended. The collapsible metal tube, patented in 1841, let painters carry colours outdoors. Vincent van Gogh ridged paint, Chaim Soutine smeared and twisted it, and Lucian Freud built flesh from dense, chalky layers. Look at edges and highlights: oil keeps a record of how each passage was made.