Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice

MEMOIRE

U. PIINTURE A L'ENCAUSTIQUE

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Figure 5. Frontispiece and title page from
Caylus and Majault's Memoire sur la
peinture a l'eneaustique et sur la peinture
a la eire. 1775. Geneva and Paris.

In spite of the laments of certain people who complain if the taste of the

century for dictionaries, this predilection is increasing, a proof if the benifrt

the public is receiving. We are inundated, and if this torrent is not stopped,

we will be learning only fr om dictionaries .... We want to know every­

thing-or rather speak if every thing and pretend to be ig norant if nothing.

We must submit, therifore, to this "gout du siecle. JJ

Encaustic painting

The history of oil painting was an eighteenth-century fascination. In the mid­

eighteenth century Diderot still believed, as De La Fontaine previously as­

serted in his seventeenth-century treatise, that the art of painting was reborn

when "Jean de Bruges" Gan van Eyck) discovered the "secret" of oil painting.

It was generally accepted that the Ancient painters possessed superior tech­

niques, and that it should be possible to "rediscover" their methods. By the

eighteenth century there was also concern about the state of seventeenth­

century paintings, which no longer retained the freshness of those more re­

cently painted (23).

The experiments of the Count of Caylus and his search fo r the Ancients'

"lost" painting media that did not discolor, flake, or deteriorate are well

known, possibly because Caylus himself published a memoir on the subject

in 1755 (24). Diderot and the painter Bachelier were also interested in the

experiments with encaustic or colored wax.

The method, which required a hot plate to fu se the final composition, had

many variations; some involved impregnating a gouache painting with a layer

of wax, while other methods used colored waxes (Figs. 5, 6) (25). By 1770,

M. Charles Baron de Taubenhiem was convinced he had succeeded where

the Count had fa iled. Joseph Fratrel published this method in La eire alliee

avec l'huile ou la peinture a huile-cire, and offered a fr ee sample to any recognized

painting academy (26).

Eludoric painting

Another painter concerned about the deterioration of oil paintings was Vin­

cent de Montpetit, a painter of miniatures who invented eludoric painting in

1775 as a permanent fo rm of painting. The name of the technique was de-

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  Figure 6. Plates 1 and 2 from Caylus and Majault's Memoire sur la peinture a l'eneaustique et
  sur la peinture a la eire. 1755. Geneva and Paris.

Massing 25