Almost all who paint in oils use conventional brushes, but there’s a significant minority who sometimes, or frequently, use different tools to apply and shape the paint layer. Of those, the most popular are palette knives, generally used to move and mix paint on the palette. Others have used the other end of the brush stick to incise, or their fingers.

Marie Bashkirtseff’s painting of a class in the Académie Julien in Paris in 1881 demonstrates how oil painting should be done by the textbook. The artist, shown in her self-portrait in the centre foreground, is using a long-bladed palette knife to prepare the paint on her palette. At her feet, on an old sheet of newspaper, are her brushes, all with handles of typical length, and the pupil behind her is using a maul stick to rest her right hand while painting with her brush.

Gustave Courbet applied his paint using a palette knife for some of his paintings. This has been identified from the facture in some of his paintings of caves that he made from about 1864, including The Grotto of Sarrazine near Nans-sous-Sainte-Anne above.

Another enthusiast for painting with a knife was Auguste Renoir.

In 1866, Renoir painted his friend Jules Le Coeur and his Dogs in the Forest of Fontainebleau. This is unusual among his works, as it was preceded by two studies, and all three were made using the palette knife rather than brushes. This makes it most likely to have been painted before Renoir abandoned the knife and returned to the brush, by the middle of May 1866.

Renoir returned to the technique in The Mosque, also known as Arab Festival, in 1881. Small strokes of bright colour and energetic work with the palette knife give it a strong feeling of movement, and it so impressed Claude Monet that he bought it from Durand-Ruel in 1900.

Anna Althea Hills’ Fall, Orange County Park (1916) is a classic and highly accomplished plein air painting that appears to have been made with extensive and deft use of the knife, particularly in the foreground.

Perhaps the most famous artist who is known to have painted with his fingers is Leonardo da Vinci.

This Annunciation, painted in oil and tempera on a poplar panel, is generally agreed to be one of the earliest of Leonardo’s own surviving paintings. When it was painted is in greater doubt, but a suggestion of around 1473-75 seems most appropriate. There are numerous pentimenti, particularly in the head of the Virgin. Its perspective projection is marked in scores in its ground and Leonardo used his spontaneous and characteristic technique of fingerpainting in some of its passages.

Finally, some painters are well-known for their use of brushes with exceptionally long handles. These enabled them to stand back, sometimes almost on the opposite side of their studio, get an overall view of their canvas, and paint from the same distance as a viewer.

Like all plein air painters, Paul César Helleu (1859–1927) shown in John Singer Sargent’s An Out-of-Doors Study from about 1889, is using brushes with handles of modest length. His canvas is fairly small, and he’s working close-in while clutching a brace of brushes in his left hand. Some designed for use when painting in front of the motif have even shorter handles, but when back in the studio Helleu would almost certainly have opted for longer.

Whistler was renowned for using brushes with handles over one metre (39 inches) long, and appears to have used them when painting Symphony in White No. 1: The White Girl in 1862 on a canvas just over two metres (78 inches) tall. He reworked it between 1867-72 to make it more ‘spiritual’ and reduce its original realism.

Early in his career, Joaquín Sorolla established his reputation of painting ‘voraciously’, often using brushes with extremely long handles and large canvases. Although Sewing the Sail from 1896 may look a spontaneous study of the effects of dappled light, Sorolla composed this carefully with the aid of at least two drawings and a sketch, and given its 2.2 metre (87 inches) height, he was almost certainly using brushes of similar length.

The closest an artist comes to painting with pure pigment is when applying soft pastel to the ground. From the earliest cave art, humans have applied powdered earths and chalks to surfaces. Some of the oldest surviving masterpieces made using coloured chalks include those of Leonardo da Vinci, and are sometimes incorrectly referred to as pastels.

An example is this drawing of Isabella d’Este from 1500, described here as using “black and red chalk, yellow pastel chalk on paper”. But there is no such thing as “pastel chalk”, any more than there is “oil watercolour”.

Pastels are much more than just a stick of pigmented chalk or coloured earth, as they’re made by mixing pigment and a bulking powder, with water containing a gum or glue, into a thick dough-like paste. That paste is dried slowly in sticks to become sufficiently firm as to be capable of being sharpened and applied to paper or another ground.

Painting in pastels requires many sticks of different colours; although those can be blended on the paper or ground, pastels don’t mix like oil paints to produce good intermediate colours. You can’t paint properly in pastels with just half a dozen different colours, but need dozens or hundreds to support a broad spectrum. This shows one of my sets of pastels, a Winsor & Newton boxed set of 200.

Careful assessment by Thea Burns has established that the earliest painter in pastels was probably Robert Nanteuil.

Nanteuil’s Portrait of Monseigneur Louis Doni d’Attichy, Bishop of Riez from 1663 is one of the first true pastel paintings, relatively small, but expertly worked. When these became popular in the eighteenth century they quickly became all the rage. Unlike oil paints applied in layers over a period of weeks, pastels adhere to the ground mechanically, and have no drying time. A good pastellist could produce a fine portrait in just a few sittings, making them far less demanding on both parties, much quicker, and of course considerably cheaper. The ‘look’ of pastel paintings also came into vogue, with flesh looking lifelike with a soft, matte finish.

Initially there were no fixatives to help the adhesion of pastel to ground, so they all had to be glazed, and even then didn’t prove as durable as a well-made oil painting. But at that price, only the very rich would care.

Next, mainstream artists started using pastels in preparatory work and sketches, here Charles Antoine Coypel’s dramatic portrait of Medea (c 1715).

One of the most brilliant of this first big wave of pastellists was Rosalba Carriera, whose work demonstrated that a good pastel painter could match the accomplishments of the best oil painters of the day. She had a painterly style at times, as shown in her rich marks in Africa, for which I don’t have a date.

In the fingers of a skilled pastellist, materials like hair and fur that had long challenged painters in oils became great strengths. Carriera’s superb Self-Portrait as ‘Winter’ from 1730-31 is a fine example, as seen in the detail below.

Look carefully and you can see individual grains of pastel that form each mark she made. She didn’t just apply her pastels dry and from the stick, but in places turned them back into a paste using water, and applied that to the paper with a brush.

The star pastellist of the middle of that century was undoubtedly Maurice Quentin de La Tour, whose works are readily seen in the Louvre and elsewhere.

De La Tour not only excelled at modelling softer surfaces and materials to which pastels are so suited, but tackled harder and glittery materials used in jewellery and the like. They’re particularly well shown in his Portrait of Marie-Josèphe of Saxony, Dauphine of France (1731–1767) (1756-60).

After de La Tour, the next brilliant pastellist was quite a contrast: Jean-Etienne Liotard, whose meticulous realism is just breathtaking. Applying his pastels to parchment rather than paper, he was able to paint painstakingly detailed works like The Chocolate Girl (c 1744-45). This shows how the medium was moving on from regular portraits.

Only when you see the patterned grain of the pastel on parchment does it become clear that this is not oil paint. I still marvel at the glass of water: surely a demonstration tour de force to make the viewer gasp in wonder.

Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s simple portrait of a baby from about 1790 takes up from where Carriera and de La Tour had made their marks. This infant’s face is softly rendered, but their clothes are sketched in a loose style far in advance of oil paintings of the day.

Pastel painting remained popular through the nineteenth century, but its next major advances came with those around the Impressionists, rather than the core Impressionists, who overwhelmingly preferred oils.

Édouard Manet’s Woman Fastening Her Garter (1878-79) shows a motif many would associate more with Degas, and a spontaneous and sketchy style, with an emphasis on form.

Paul César Helleu was radical and exciting in his pastels; his portrait of Consuelo Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough (c 1900) combines perfect, smooth blending over her face with vigorous mark-making through the fabrics and the ornate frame of the chair, as shown in the detail below.

Edgar Degas was another innovative painter in pastels, whose work encouraged Odilon Redon to take the medium on into the twentieth century.

His recurrent theme of a small sailing boat, which kept appearing in Redon’s later paintings, was expressed most extensively in his pastels. Some, like Flower Clouds (c 1903), above, show the boat sketched in roughly, his paper being dominated by nebulous patches of colour from behind.

His best-known painting of the boat, The Yellow Sail (c 1905), below, was painted in pastel too. He exploits new and more intense pigments here, for the sparkling gems in the boat, and the clothing of the two women.

Although the period since has seen new media such as acrylics, there is still nothing else like painting in pure pigment.

Reference

Thea Burns (2007) The Invention of Pastel Painting, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 12 3.