Professional artists have long used brushes to apply paint in their finished work, and many used hand-held sticks of pigment only when sketching in preparation. Charcoal has been widely used, with metal wire in silverpoint an alternative. In the sixteenth century, large deposits of graphite were discovered in Cumbria, England, following which graphite sticks and sheathed pencils became enormously popular among both amateurs and professionals.

Although it’s impossible to make any clear distinction between drawing and painting, those stick-based media are simple compared with oil paints, and seldom used in works comparable in their aims or sophistication to professional oil or watercolour painting.

The first changes in practice resulted from the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars at the turn of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. Graphite was a strategic product, as it was used as a refractory in the manufacture of cannonballs, and supplies to France all but dried up. In 1795 Nicolas-Jacques Conté used a mixture of clay, graphite and other pigments to form sticks similar to pastels but significantly harder, referred to as hard pastels or Conté crayons.

As with charcoal and graphite sticks and pencils, Conté crayons were first used for preparatory sketching. By the middle of the nineteenth century, artists like Jean-François Millet extended their use into pastel paintings including his enchanting and mysterious The Cat at the Window from about 1857-58. Because of their hardness, Conté crayons were more amenable to sharpening, so could make finer lines and a richer range of marks.

Millet’s most famous painting in pastel and Conté crayon is this 1865-66 version of The Sower, a motif that was to recur in the hands of others for the rest of the century, and works perfectly in what were still relatively unconventional media.

Conté crayons, like pencil, charcoal and pastels, rely on mechanical adhesion rather than any polymerising binder. Specialised papers with roughened surfaces were marketed to improve their adhesion, but they share similar problems of longevity. However, at a time when mark-making was becoming popular, the wide range of effects available from sticks of pigment was an attraction: not only could the artist place bold strokes of colour over stumped-smooth areas, but they could also paint on textured grounds to great effect.

One of the masters of the Conté crayon was the Divisionist Georges Seurat, who used textured papers to give his paintings or drawings a highly granular appearance, as if they were photographs.

The rise of industrial chemistry and manufacturing industries in the nineteenth century brought other new painting sticks. Wax crayons effectively functioned as a low-temperature encaustic, and became popular in schools. They were adopted for resist techniques in watercolours, notably by John Singer Sargent, and some artists started using them in combination with other media.

Félicien Rops’ painting of a Hamadryad from about 1885 uses a wide range of media, drawn from those already popular among the illustrators of the day.

Another enthusiast for mixed stick media was Odilon Redon, for instance in his painting of Sîta from about 1893.

Although the mainstream Impressionists largely kept to oil on canvas, those on the periphery including Jean-François Raffaëlli were more experimental in their choice of media: his Parisian Rag Pickers from about 1890 was made using a mixture of oil paints and oil crayons.

The new generation of painters who started their careers in the early twentieth century used stick media increasingly. Egon Schiele was a prolific draftsman who used drawing techniques extensively in his painting. This work showing Krumau Town Crescent (Small Town V) (1915) is based on a drawing he had made the previous year, and uses the unusual combination of black crayon, gouache and oils.

For this Portrait of the Artist’s Wife Seated, Holding Her Right Leg, Schiele used just black crayon and gouache.

Some of the older generation joined in with unusual combinations of media. Late in his life, the former Divisionist Paul Signac painted many brilliantly coloured views of the south of France using combinations of watercolour and crayons, such as Antibes (1917) above, and The Old Port of Marseilles (1931) below.

On the other side of the Atlantic, also late in his career, Joseph Stella developed a novel drawing technique combining traditional metalpoint with modern crayons, which he used in his intimate portrait of Kathleen Millay from about 1923-24, above, and Eggplant, one of his last works, completed in 1944, below.

Metalpoint uses fine metal wire, most commonly silver, mounted in a holder, and is a slow and meticulous method of drawing or painting; its marks on paper are only faint to begin with, but they darken slowly as the fine tracks of silver tarnish.

Late in his career, Pierre Bonnard incorporated stick media in some of his paintings. The richly textured marks in this painting of his wife Marthe in The Bath from 1942 are strokes of coloured crayon, worked over gouache and pastels.

Paul Nash added both graphite and crayon marks to his 1937 watercolour of Three Rooms, a painting with strong graphic elements.

In the nineteen-twenties and -thirties, several art suppliers developed new types of crayon, using proper binders intended to allow more extensive effects and working, greater versatility, and improved longevity. These mixed conventional pigments with a bewildering array of waxes, oils and other substances, including:

• waxes and gums, to make crayons (sheathed in paper) and pencils (in wood);
• waxes, to make grease pencils;
• waxes and oils, to make lithographic crayons;
• mineral wax (paraffin), to make wax crayons;
• synthetic wax (polyethylene), to make water-dispersible wax crayons, such as Caran d’Ache Neocolor crayons;
• waxes and non-drying oils, to make oil pastels;
• waxes and drying oils, to make oil sticks and oil bars, that can form polymerised paint layers similar to conventional oil paints.

Their physical properties, determined by the binders used, in turn determine how they can be applied, appropriate grounds, fragility of the stick and its suitability for sharpening, whether diluents are organic solvents or water, and the depth and robustness of the resulting paint layer.

Unfortunately, even reputable manufacturers seem reluctant to provide detailed information on the lightfastness of pigments used, and to achieve high chroma level in attractive colours they often resort to pigments known to be fugitive on exposure to light. During the twentieth century in particular, this resulted in many fine paintings being made using media that rapidly became a conservation nightmare, either because the paint film has proved unstable, or their initially brilliant colours have faded rapidly.

Some types of media, in particular coloured pencils, have been vulnerable to irresponsible suppliers and artists who have put blind faith in products that have proved ephemeral. Sadly, few artists have obeyed the exhortation for the buyer to beware, and assessed the permanence of the media they have used in paintings which have been sold for large sums.

Among the most recent, and still unproven, media are oil pastels, which work into creamy layers, and undergo only limited hardening because they don’t incorporate drying oils like linseed or walnut. Their origins are controversial: first developed in Japan, and slightly later in Europe, it’s claimed that Pablo Picasso preferred them.

Oil pastels have certainly shown themselves capable in some unusual circumstances, such as Robert Clark Templeton’s court paintings, including his Sketch of an Overview of the Courtroom from 1971. Few courts would have even considered him using watercolours, for example, and for this case he chose modern and unobtrusive oil pastels. This sketch has been executed briskly, with effective use of gestures and marks.

Once a sketch has been laid down in oil pastels, it’s quick to work that up into a more detailed portrait like Templeton’s Drawing for CBS Evening News of Bobby G. Seale and others (1971).

Copyright restrictions prevent me from showing examples of stick media in the hands of modern artists, but I conclude by showing a couple of my own amateur efforts.

This Alpine landscape was painted in the studio using Sennelier oil pastels on Daler Rowney Ingres pastel paper.

This dawn view of the Pont Royal in the centre of Paris was painted with Caran d’Ache water-dispersible Neocolor crayons on paper. This uses base washes brought out from an initial dry crayon sketch, with superimposed texturing using dry crayon – something hard to achieve in watercolour.

Modern stick-based media look alluring, and are persuasively marketed by their vendors. However, those are seldom the traditional art materials suppliers that they might seem: most have been bought up by large companies that are primarily driven by increasing sales revenues, and may have little understanding of the requirements and problems of painting media.

Modern vendors are often secretive over the composition of their products, and although good standards exist for lightfastness, few publish data for their product ranges. Finally, their advantages in the making of art are often marred by the need to protect these paintings under glass.

The appearance of new objects or unexpected phenomena in the sky was an event of great significance in the past, and often considered to be a portent of the future, good or bad. This article considers the few that were recorded in paintings, and starts with the most famous of all, the star of Bethlehem that appears in many depictions of the birth of Christ.

The linked stories of the birth of Christ in a shed at Bethlehem, and the subsequent adoration of the infant by three wise men, kings or Magi “from the east”, are among the most popular and enduring among paintings in the Christian canon. The outlines given in the Gospels of Luke, chapter 2, and Matthew, chapter 2, have conventionally become elaborated.

Three wise men had seen a new star, possibly a comet or an unusually bright planet, which they believed would lead them to the birth of a great prophet. They travelled by the guidance of that star, to arrive at Bethlehem. There they found the newborn Christ with Mary his mother, paid homage to him in the shed in which the holy family was lodging, and presented their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Giotto’s Adoration of the Magi from about 1305 shows the star as a celestial ball of fire streaking across the sky, and the three wise men pay their respects to the newborn Christ and his mother.

Above Bosch’s view of the local Brabant countryside in his Adoration of the Magi of 1490-1500 he places a more modest and stationary star shining bright over its distant city, as shown in the detail below.

Blake’s version of the Adoration of the Kings is conventional in showing the three wise men presenting their gifts to Jesus and his parents. At the left, outside, shepherds are tending to their flocks of sheep beneath a stylised star, and at the right are the ox and ass.

There remains controversy over what celestial event might have occurred at the time.

Very few paintings show known events in the sky, and I know of only one depicting a full solar eclipse.

Although many painters, particularly the Impressionists, have shown fleeting effects of light and the occasional rainbow, Enrique Simonet took the opportunity of a solar eclipse on 30 August 1905 to paint his Eclipse (1905). This was visible across eastern and northern Spain between about 1300 and 1320 UTC, and this painting is one of its few remaining records.

Realistic paintings of comets are also rare, and unimpressive.

Generally acclaimed as William Dyce’s finest painting, Pegwell Bay, Kent – a Recollection of October 5th 1858 (c 1858) shows this bay on the Kent coast, during a family holiday visit: a coastal scene worked up into a large finished oil painting. Although not easily seen in this image, there’s a small point of light high in the middle of the sky which is Donati’s comet, not due to return until 3811. Couple that with the inclination of the sun and the state of the tide, and you should be able to place this view precisely in both time and space, and confirm that it does indeed show this bay on 5 October 1858.

A few paintings show impossible celestial events.

John Martin’s painting of The Deluge from 1834 has two points of reference: the Biblical account of the flood, and Martin’s personal belief in prior catastrophe. As the sciences became ascendant during the nineteenth century, some educated people believed that in the past there had been an alignment of the sun, earth, and moon, and the collision of a comet resulting in global flooding. This was promoted by the French natural scientist Baron Georges Cuvier, and subscribed to by Martin.

True to form, his painting is dark and apocalyptic: near the centre, tiny survivors are just about to be overwhelmed by an immense wave bearing down at them from the left and above. The misaligned sun and moon barely penetrate the dense cloud, and to the top right is a melée of rock avalanche and lightning bolt. This was awarded a gold medal at the Paris Salon of 1835.

Several of Paul Nash’s surrealist landscapes show the moon in its phases, among them Landscape of the Vernal Equinox (III) from 1944, which presents the impossible view of a full moon and the sun visible close together and just above the horizon.