Since ancient times people have written, drawn and painted using pigments and dyes in water, often without any binder to adhere them to the ground. These are generically termed inks, and distinct from other media such as watercolours or the temperas. Most common among them is India ink, whose essential ingredients are carbon particles from soot, suspended in water. When applied to a suitably absorbent ground that has stood the test of centuries.

Hieronymus Bosch’s study of The Owl’s Nest from around 1505-1516 is a good example of a pen and ink drawing starting to transcend into painting.

Washes applied using a brush became common in sketches made in front of the motif, such as Egbert van der Poel’s Fire in the Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam, in 1645. Known for his paintings of fires, he used these sketches to paint his famous brandjes in the studio. Landscape artists such as Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain used the same sketching media working en plein air to build image libraries for the idealised landscapes used in their finished paintings.

By the early nineteenth century, artists like Samuel Palmer were creating works that are to all intents and purposes full-blown paintings using black and coloured inks, such as this atmospheric nocturne of Cornfield and Church by Moonlight from about 1830.

Used without a binder, inks normally rewet and smudge or blur, so have to be applied after any watercolour. Adding a binder such as shellac to India ink makes it waterproof when it has dried, and this was used in combination with watercolours by illustrators and painters such as the great Arthur Rackham, here in one of his illustrations for an edition of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

A related medium that also crossed over from drawings and illustrations into paintings is casein, a protein-based tempera. It too has a long history, but didn’t become popular among artists until the late nineteenth century. Casein is a protein originally obtained from sour milk, but by the nineteenth century it was more usually prepared by the addition of rennet, enzymes used in cheese manufacture, extracted from the stomachs of calves.

Casein powder is then turned into paint by dispersion in an alkaline solution, typically made from lime or borax, and pigment is ground in. When lime is used the paint works best on porous grounds, but must be used fresh. When a little linseed oil is added to borax casein, a shelf-life of several months or more is possible. Casein paints dry as quickly as egg tempera, but can be reworked for a period until their binder has fully hardened. Once that has taken place, their paint film is robust and stable.

The earliest painting I have seen that is known to have been made using casein paints is William Morris Hunt’s unusual view of Niagara from 1879. Hunt deviated here from his customary use of oils, although he still applied his paint to a prepared canvas support.

One of the most famous artists to have used casein paint is Gustav Klimt. In 1902, he used it in a frieze of 24 metres (nearly 80 feet) length for the fourteenth exhibition of the Vienna Secession, his Beethoven Frieze, of which that above is a section known as The Hostile Powers, and that below is Nagging Grief. He applied his casein paint directly onto mortar with added stucco, gold leaf, and other materials. This is known to be a robust form of wall-painting that is much more accommodating than fresco, and just as enduring, but has never become popular.

A few of Colin Campbell Cooper’s skyscraper cityscapes were painted using casein media, including this view of Flatiron Building, Manhattan from about 1908. He was equally proficient in watercolour and oils, and I don’t know why he experimented with casein, nor why he used it so infrequently.

Another Vienna-based artist, Albin Egger-Lienz, also used casein on occasion, here in this fourth of several different versions of Totentanz (Dance of Death) from 1915.

During the twentieth century, casein paints didn’t become popular but continued in use, particularly by those who also made illustrations. Just when they were attracting a following among artists such as Andy Warhol, they were rapidly displaced by acrylics. Despite that, casein paint is still available today, sold by Pelikan under the brand name of Plaka.

Before the Dutch Golden Age, painting scenes at night had been restricted to religious and other narrative works, and very few if any landscapes had been depicted during the hours of darkness. After all, what’s the point of a view if it’s all dark and you can’t admire it?

The Dutch Republic changed that, in part because it was in Northern Europe, where for several months each year it’s mostly dark, and these nocturnes had novelty value. Among those of the middle class who could afford to, it was fashionable to cover the walls inside your house with paintings, and nocturnes, known then as maneschijntjes (moonshines), certainly brought variety to those collections.

Aelbert Cuyp’s view of the Sea by Moonlight from about 1648 is one of the earlier maritime nocturnes, something of a sub-sub-genre that must have been sought after. Unlike many others, this appears to be faithful to the original light.

During the 1640s, Aert van der Neer, a landscape painter in Amsterdam, started experimenting with his first nocturnes, and came to specialise in them.

His River View by Moonlight from about 1650-55 shows a bustling village on a river, with several boats under way and two windmills in the distance. The moon appears to be depicted faithfully in terms of size, without the common tendency to exaggerate that as a result of the Moon Illusion. Surviving studies for some of these nocturnes demonstrate that van der Neer initially sketched a landscape in daylight, and based the detail in his finished studio painting on that.

In about 1655, he painted this finely detailed River Landscape with Moonlight, with a larger moon lighting clouds dramatically.

Some of his best nocturnes are lit by a combination of the moon and the warmer light from a fire. This undated Estuary Landscape by Moonlight uses light from both sources to great effect. Landscape details are shown largely in silhouette, and lack internal detail except in the group gathered around the fire in the foreground. Van der Neer is unusually faithful to reality in this monochrome, the result of the severely impaired colour vision we all suffer in conditions of low light, when there’s insufficient to enable colour vision using the cone cells in the human retina.

At some stage, van der Neer started painting more destructive fires, including this undated Fire in Amsterdam by Night, leading to another sub-sub-genre that was taken up by others.

In mid 1652, Jan Abrahamsz Beerstraaten seems to have witnessed the destruction by fire of part of the centre of Amsterdam, which formed the basis of his studio painting of The Old Town Hall of Amsterdam on Fire, 7 July 1652 (1652-55). Local inhabitants are walking in orderly queues to boats, in which they escape from the scene. This may have been the same fire painted by van der Neer, above.

Egbert van der Poel specialised in these brandjes,, and probably painted more than any other artist in history. He moved to Delft in 1650, and four years later was a victim of the massive explosion in a gunpowder store there on 12 October 1654. That killed one of his children, and he moved again to Rotterdam.

It has been thought that most of van der Poel’s Fire of a Church with Staffage and Cattle from 1658 is a carefully-composed composite of his experiences. A small church at the edge of a village is well ablaze, and the inhabitants are abandoning it, taking all the possessions they can, including their horses and livestock, and leaving the fire to burn itself out.

Van der Poel’s undated A Fire at Night shows a similar scene and composition, set this time on the bank of a canal.

One established exception to this is van der Poel’s Fire in De Rijp of 1654, completed in 1662. This shows a fire that worked its way through more than eight hundred buildings in the town of De Rijp during the night of 6 January 1654. This left only the northern section of the town standing and inhabitable, and resulted in more casualties than did the more famous explosion in Delft at the end of that year.

Doubt is cast on this received account of van der Poel’s work by sketches such as this, of The Fire in the Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam, in 1645, made in front of the motif using washes with touches of pen and brown ink. Perhaps he was the first ‘ambulance chaser’ who travelled out to sketch fires, from which he later painted his famous brandjes in the studio.

For the non-specialist like Jacob van Ruisdael, winter was an ideal opportunity to explore the effect of negative images, where objects that would normally be seen as dark on a light background were reversed to white on dark.

Van Ruisdael painted at least two such landscapes featuring trees. Both are now known by the same name, and are believed to be from the same decade. This Winter Landscape (c 1660-70), in the Mauritshuis, picks out frosted leaves in the half-light of dusk or dawn, by a hamlet at the water’s edge. In the far distance, to the left of the buildings, there is a church with a spire.

The other version of Winter Landscape (c 1660-70) is in Birmingham, Alabama. With similar sky, cloud, lighting, and composition, the water here appears to have frozen over. The frost on the trees is just as delicately handled.