In the long-distant past, our ancestors discovered that processing some natural products created glues. The raw materials either came from boiling animal bones, hide, and other offal, or from natural exudates of plants, and these came to be used as the binder for paints. Being ancient in origin, different combinations of binder, pigment, and other substances developed, and those have left a confusion of terms, including glue tempera, and distemper. These represent a spectrum of paints, ranging from those using only glue and pigment, to others also incorporating substantial amounts of powdered chalk or lime to increase their opacity, and related to whitewash.

Glue tempera was used in antiquity, and outside Europe remains in widespread use. It has several disadvantages for the painter, including:

• ‘Drying light’; as the paint dries, so it undergoes marked colour change, reducing the intensity of chroma.
• Mechanical fragility of the paint layer, which is particularly susceptible to abrasion and/or cracking.
• Solution on re-wetting, so that glue tempera can easily be reworked like watercolour, but is unsuitable for exposure to water or damp. Hardening of the glue binder isn’t the result of a stable polymerisation as with oil paints, and can readily be reversed.
• Relatively poor protection of light-sensitive pigments, resulting in some fading over time.

Taken together these mean that what we see in glue tempera paintings today is often quite different from how they looked at the time they were painted.

In the early Renaissance, some artists used glue tempera extensively and with great success, although surviving works haven’t aged as well as those painted using egg tempera or oils.

Dieric Bouts’ The Entombment from about 1450 was painted using glue tempera on linen. As it’s now well over half a millennium old its colours have faded, but it remains worth seeking out when you next visit The National Gallery in London.

In the south of Europe, Andrea Mantegna was one of its great exponents, as shown in his marvellous glue tempera and gold painting of A Sibyl and a Prophet from about 1495. Because this is monochrome and uses gold as the pigment, this has neither changed colour nor faded.

Some artists, such as Joris Hoefnagel, continued to use these ancient techniques, as shown in this painting of Diana and Actaeon from 1597. This is finely executed in glue tempera and gold on vellum, and its colours have survived well.

With the widespread adoption of oil paint, glue tempera almost disappeared until it was revived at the end of the eighteenth century by William Blake.

Blake painted a series of major works in what he termed tempera, using glue as their binder. This Adoration of the Kings from 1799 shows the dulling of colour and fine cracking from his use of stretched canvas as its support.

Some of Blake’s glue tempera paintings have survived in better condition: The Christ Child Asleep on the Cross, or Our Lady Adoring the Infant Jesus Asleep on the Cross from 1799-1800 has fared better, retaining more of its original colour.

Paintings such as Blake’s Virgin and Child in Egypt from 1810 show the fine modelling he was able to achieve in its figures. Overall, though, the condition of his glue tempera paintings isn’t good. It has been suggested that some of their variation is attributable to different sources of glue, clearly of major importance. For a long time, glues provided for this and similar purposes in painting have been referred to as rabbit skin glue, but in reality the great majority have been derived from a wide range of animal products, often in uncontrolled conditions.

After Blake, the medium fell back into obscurity until later in the nineteenth century, when it was revived by movements attempting to return to techniques of the past, most prominently the Nabis in France.

Pierre Bonnard used glue tempera early in his career, when painting this exquisite three-panelled Japoniste screen of The Stork and Four Frogs in about 1889, as the Nabis were forming. Using more modern pigments, Bonnard has achieved high chroma, comparable to anything in oils, and quite unlike traditional glue tempera.

Odilon Redon experimented with glue tempera in his painting of Buddha from 1904.

Édouard Vuillard used glue tempera in many of his paintings both during his Nabi period and later, for example in this view Under the Trees of the Red House from about 1905.

Vuillard’s At The Pavillons in Cricqueboeuf. In Front of the House, from 1911, shows how effective the medium can be.

Vuillard continued to use glue tempera in his late realist paintings, such as Morning Concert, Place Vintimille from 1937-38, showing a trio of friends playing for the artist in his Paris apartment.

Glue tempera remains in use today by a very few artists, who at least have a wider range of lightfast pigments to choose from, and more consistent formulations of glue to act as binder.

In the first of these two articles showing masterly landscape paintings of summer storms, I had reached John Constable in the early 1830s.

Of Constant Troyon’s early paintings the most outstanding must be The Approaching Storm from 1849. Set on a river worthy of Constable, two anglers appear to be readying themselves for the torrential rain heading towards them, while others still wander in the last patch of sunshine on the far bank.

Jules Noel’s Panorama of the Town of Dieppe (c 1865) shows a large picnic party on the cliffs overlooking the town of Dieppe on the coast of northern France. These families seem blissfully unaware of the dark clouds and heavy rain already over the land to the right.

One of the finest and most dramatic of Albert Bierstadt’s paintings from his second expedition to the West in 1863 is this of A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie from 1866. Its foreground shows a pastoral valley floor with a native American camp, in mottled light. Some people and their animals are seen making haste to return from the pastures to the shelter of the camp. A small rocky outcrop has trees straggling over it, which are silhouetted against the brilliant sunlight on the lake behind, in the middle distance.

Behind the lake the land rises sharply, with rock crags also bright in the sunshine. In the background the land is blanketed by indigo and black storm-clouds. Those are piled high, obscuring much of Mount Rosalie, but its ice-clad peaks show proud, high up above the storm, with patches of blue sky above and beyond them. A single large bird, an eagle perhaps, is seen in silhouette, high above the lake.

It was Volodymyr Orlovsky’s painting of Harvest on the steppe in Ukraine, in 1882, that apparently earned the artist’s promotion to Professor in the Imperial Academy.

Few artists ever get to witness tropical storms, but after his time painting winter storms at Cullercoats in England, Winslow Homer witnessed and painted this Hurricane, Bahamas in 1898.

In 1903, Gustav Klimt spent his summer holiday at Attersee with his partner’s family, where he painted this landscape of an Approaching Thunderstorm. Many of his other landscape paintings made during his summers away show no sky at all, but this is an exception.

Thunderstorm at Vernouillet is an atmospheric landscape painted by Pierre Bonnard in 1908, or the following year. Vernouillet is on the southern bank of the river Seine, midway between the centre of Paris and Monet’s property at Giverny.

The young Canadian artist and canoeist Tom Thomson excelled in rapid sketching in oils, with several witnessed accounts of him dashing off a painting in little more than fifteen minutes. As a result he was able to capture many transient effects, such as the passing thunderstorm in Thunderhead from 1912-13.

If you’re fortunate, the storm is soon gone, its humid air blows away, and summer returns.

Arkhyp Kuindzhi specialised in painting in spectacular light. After a Thunderstorm from 1879 is one of his oil sketches capturing the brilliant colour and light following heavy summer rain on the steppe.