Made of almost pure pigment, soft pastel painting didn’t start until after 1650. They excel in representing flesh, so became popular for portraits, and have since extended to other genres.
Liotard
Painting captions give information you’d never get from looking at an image, and that in turn tells you even more. This series looks beyond mere images at the media behind them.
Key factors making oil paint most suitable include its slow drying, wide range of viscosity, and robust paint layer. But it has its rules too.
Don Quixote, Netherlandish Proverbs, grain fields in Ukraine, a flock of sheep in a boat, the Golden Horn, pastels and kabkabs.
Only the gods wore sandals in the ancient world. Then the state of your footwear told much about you, with fashion opting for the outrageously impractical.
From Rubens’ double-portrait with Isabella Brant, and Rembrandt’s with Saskia, to Paul Signac’s wife with a parasol and Ferdinand Hodler’s wife Berthe Jacques.
From Robert Nanteuil’s first pastel portraits in the 1660s to Ants Laikmaa in 1929, a history of the greatest pastel painters and links to articles about individual artists.
From about 1900, he painted almost exclusively in pastel, finely realist works that rendered surface optical properties to perfection.
Applying his soft pastels to vellum, his paintings are hyper-realist in their fine detail. He was also an eccentric, living mostly in Turkish dress, and a renowned painter of portraits.
In many paintings, depiction of fabrics, textiles and other clothing materials is more challenging and important than that of flesh.
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