5 Interesting Facts About Oil Painting

Discover 5 interesting facts you probably didn’t know about the wonderful world of oil painting

What do Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, and Vermeer’s Girl With A Pearl Earring all have in common? Besides being some of the greatest masterpieces of all time, they are all excellent examples of oil paintings.

Thanks to its rich textures, versatility and visual opulence, oil painting is an extremely popular choice for artists all over the world. But do you know where oil paints come from? Or what weird and wonderful materials were originally used to make them?

Find out in this video.

Ancient Origins

Due to the popularity of works from Raphael and Leonardo Da Vinci, many people mistakenly believe that oil painting began in the Renaissance period. In fact, oil paints were used much earlier and date all the way back to the 7th Century AD, in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, where Buddhist monks would use oil extracted from walnuts or poppies as a binding agent when painting murals on the walls of caves.

A colorful past

Nowadays, we’re more likely to make oil paints using synthetic pigments, but this has not always been the case. Some colors in particular have some very surprising stories behind them. Take Indian yellow for example, said to be made from the urine of cows fed on mango leaves, or Tyrian Purple (a favorite in Roman times), which was made using the glands of sea snails. And how about Mummy Brown? Believe it or not, it was made using the ground up remains of Egyptian mummies.

Recipe for success

Oil paints do not technically dry, but set and harden instead. Depending on the thickness of the layers applied, the pigments, and the kind of oil used to bind them, this can take anything from hours, days, or even weeks. Renaissance painter Jan Van Eyck made a breakthrough discovery when he found a formula with a mixture of linseed and nut oils that “dried” at the perfect rate. He had no intention of sharing his discovery, and kept it a closely guarded secret until just before his death, when he revealed it to fellow painter Antonello Da Messina.

The price of fame

We’ve all heard of Da Vinci’s great masterpiece, the Mona Lisa. So it may not come as a surprise to learn that it’s also the most expensive oil painting in the world, last valued at 867 million American dollars. Selling it, however, is illegal under France’s Heritage Code Law, as collections held at museums that belong to public bodies are considered public property.

Impressionism and the paint tube

We take for granted the ease at which we can buy and store oil paints nowadays. Those handy little metal tubes provide us with premixed paints that are fresh and ready to use, whether we’re painting in a studio or outdoors. But have you ever considered how painters mixed and stored their oil paints before the invention of the paint tube? Artists had to work almost like scientists in a laboratory, mixing their own pigments by hand before storing them in pigs’ bladders. When John Goffe Rand invented the first collapsible artist's paint tube in 1841, it was a breakthrough for artists and a major factor in the rise of Impressionism. Artists could now paint outdoors "en plain air" (a key trait of the Impressionist style) with oil paints that were easy to transport and didn’t dry out.

Did you enjoy this video? Maybe you’d like to learn more about oil painting and try it yourself? If you want to learn more, here’s a link to the online oil painting courses available at Domestika.

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- Painting Tutorial: How to Create a Quick Portrait With Oil Paints
- Oil Painting for Beginners, a course by Ale Casanova
- Painting Tutorial: Water Mixable Oils for Beginners