The Oil Painter's Bible - chapter 6
THE OIL PAINTER'S BIBLE - CHAPTER 6
Master Class - advanced oil painting principles and techniques
from the Renaissance to the present
by Virgil Elliott, APSC, ASPATECHNIQUES OF PAINTING IN OILS
From the earliest days of oil painting to the time of this writing (late Twentieth Century, into the early
Twenty-first), a number of oil painting techniques have evolved.
A great deal has been learned through
the processes of trial and error and from
the experiments of various artists
through the centuries. From Jan and
Hubert Van Eyck, possibly the first
innovators to paint pictures in oils, in
the late Fourteenth and early Fifteenth
Century, to William Bouguereau, Jean
Léon Gérôme, Alexandre Cabanel,
Jehan-Georges Vibert and the other
French Academic painters in the late
Nineteenth Century, technical
knowledge developed more or less
continuously, as artists of each
generation added their discoveries to
what their predecessors had learned.
The continuity was interrupted around the end of the Nineteenth Century as a result of the popularity of
the Impressionists, who were viewed as a rebellion against the academic style of painting. The emotional
reaction to the Impressionists' emergence resulted in a total rejection of the Academy and all it stood for,
to the detriment of art instruction throughout the Twentieth Century. The techniques taught at the
Academy and the ateliers of the Academics represented the culmination of at least five hundred years of
more or less continuous development in representational drawing and painting, dating back to the early
Renaissance. This wealth of knowledge included many of the discoveries of the Old Masters, yet it was
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