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.