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.