By the nineteenth century a great deal was known about how oil paint worked, but the process of polymerisation to produce a robust paint layer wasn’t really understood until well into the twentieth century. As a result, practices that caused structural failure of the paint layer weren’t uncommon, among them the use of pigments like asphalt, and removing drying oil binder in peinture à l’essence. This article looks at the latter, a technique used by Edgar Degas and others.

Tubed oil paints, certain colours in particular, can be oily, and Degas and others experimented with reducing the amount of oil in their paints. Squeezing paint out of the tube onto blotting paper or rag and removing excess oil shouldn’t cause problems, but peinture à l’essence took that to the extreme, in blotting out as much as possible, then restoring viscosity and flow by adding turpentine, a diluent that’s only going to weaken paint binding.

One of Degas’ earliest paintings of a girl and a woman, once he had started to paint ‘modern life’, is his Beach Scene from about 1869-70. It’s also probably one of his first experiments with peinture à l’essence, as demonstrated in its thin and uneven paint layer in the left foreground, by the white hat.

Seven years later, in his paintings of the Ballet at the Paris Opéra here from 1877, Degas experimented with another method of reducing the binder in his paint layer, by applying pastel over a monotype. He first created this painting on a non-absorbent surface, and while that was still wet used that to make a print on paper, which he completed by applying soft pastel on top.

Degas’ Danseuse dans sa loge (Dancer in her Dressing Room) (c 1879) is one of his experimental paintings combining pastel with peinture à l’essence applied to canvas. The detail view below shows how thinly he applied his paint to the ground, although it’s impossible to judge from that how well it’s adhering.

Oil paint has been so successful and its paint layers so robust because the pigment is sealed in a protective layer of polymerised oil. Pastels adhere far more tenuously, with precious little to bind them to the ground. Removing the drying oil and adding essentially unbound pigment will inevitably result in a fragile if not ephemeral result.

Degas’ Women Combing Their Hair (c 1875-6) is also painted in oils, probably using peinture à l’essence, on paper. The detail below show how its light brown ground shows through the thin and fragile layer of paint.

His remarkable composite work, made using peinture à l’essence, of a Dancer Fastening Her Shoe (c 1893-98), brings together four different views of the same dancer fastening her left shoe. This may have been inspired by Muybridge and Marey’s composite photos of human motion, and may well have reflected his own experiments in photography.

Among the other painters who seem to have used peinture à l’essence are Paul Gauguin, in his Vue de la Plage de Bellangenay (View Of The Beach At Bellangenay) (1889) above, and Toulouse-Lautrec, in his Danseuse assise aux Bas de roses (Dancer sat at the foot of Roses) (1890) shown below, which follows Degas in combining the technique with pastels.

This detail shows again a thin paint layer with the ground clearly visible between the painter’s gestural marks.

Even Édouard Vuillard gave way to temptation to paint The First Class Compartment in about 1898-1900 using peinture à l’essence, here on a cardboard ground that has been mounted on a panel support.

Fortunately this fad seems to have passed by the early twentieth century.

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.