S. C.

Arteni

Inquiry into the nature of oils and varnishes used in

the Low Countries

14th I.S.F. Congress, Section Lipids in Art,

Brighton, England, 1978

Aert de Gelder http://www.wga.hu/support/viewer/z.html

SolInvictus Press 2018

 Jan Miense Molenaer, Self portrait in the studio
http://www.casa-in-
italia.com/artpx/dut/Molenaer/Molenaer_private_Selfportrait_study.j
pg
 Hendrick Gerritsz Pot, Artist in his Studio
http://www.casa-in-
italia.com/artpx/dut/Pot/Pot_Bredius_Artist_in_his_studio.jpg
Note

I corrected errors found in the original printed

Proceedings
ADDENDA
 National Gallery Technical Bulletin Volume 15, 1994
Rembrandt and his Circle: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Paint Media
Re-examined
Raymond White and Jo Kirby

“…Rembrandt used linseed, or occasionally walnut, oil, sometimes heat-bodied:

analysis has revealed no incompatible medium mixtures, no additions of resinous
materials to give added transparency or gloss, or to aid drying…

…Chalk was occasionally used to give body and translucency to glaze-like layers
without altering their colour. Small quantities of azurite or smalt, which are good
driers, were added to pigments, like the red and yellow lakes or bone black, which
are poor driers, without affecting the overall colour of the paint layer. Smalt appears
to have been used to give bulk to thick glazes containing lake pigments as well as to
assist in their drying, which would otherwise be extremely slow. Rembrandt did use
the poorly drying Cassel earth, which is obtained from lignite or peat deposits, but it
was always mixed with other pigments including ochres, which are good driers…

…Thickening of the oil was carried out by two, chemically quite distinct, processes.
Oil placed in direct sunlight for a reasonable length of time, with periodic stirring,
thickens by a process akin to the natural thickening or drying process which takes
place when a drying oil is mixed with pigment and spread out in a thin film; that is,
polymerisation is carried out by joining the individual glyceride molecules through
peroxy linkages... Stirring the oil allows air, and thus oxygen, to be readily available.
The polymerisation process thus begins before the oil is used for painting…

…The other method of bodying the oil was to heat it, usually with the addition of lead
salts or other driers…

…Lead salts were not the only driers recommended: walnut oil might be boiled with
azurite or smalt for use with whites... Oil bodied by direct heating, without stirring,
relies upon bond formation between the glyceride molecules under circumstances
which essentially exclude the wholesale participation of oxygen molecules. The
bonds formed are thus essentially carbon-carbon, rather than carbon-oxygen ….

…According to seventeenth-century sources, no more than a quart (just over a litre)

of oil appears to have been heated at a time, usually over gentle heat for roughly half
an hour to an hour. Care was generally taken not to heat the oil too strongly, which
would deepen the colour…
 Pieter Lastman
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Hagar_and_t
he_Angel_LACMA_M.85.117.jpg
 Jan Lievens
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/portrait-of-anna-
maria-van-schurman-114999
 Gerbrand van den Eeckhout
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Gerbrand_v
an_den_Eeckhout_-_Tric-Trac_Players_-_WGA7471.jpg
 Govaert Flinck,
Rembrandt as shepherd with staff and flute
http://www.essentialvermeer.com/dutch-
painters/dutchimages/flinck_a.jpg
 Willem Drost
http://www.photo.rmn.fr/cf/htm/CSearchZ.aspx?o=&Total=15&FP=4
2202998&E=2K1KTSJ89GXY7&SID=2K1KTSJ89GXY7&New=T&P
ic=3&SubE=2C6NU04VK35N
 Nicolaes Maes
http://www.the-athenaeum.org/art/full.php?ID=89092
…Analysis has suggested that the artists of Rembrandt's circle used heat-bodied oils
principally in two circumstances: to obtain an impasto (in a highlight, for example)
and to aid the drying of pigments, like lake pigments and black, which were poor
driers…

…In Rembrandt's ‘Belshazzar's Feast’…A heat-bodied linseed oil was used for the
white impastoed paint near Belshazzar's brooch…

…The yellow highlight paint of the orange-brown silk curtain on the extreme right-
hand side of Ferdinand Bol's ‘Lady with a Fan’ … was observed to have been bound
with heat pre-polymerised linseed oil, but the paint of the curtain has quite a
pronounced texture in some areas and examination of a sample taken from a pale
greyish-yellow impasto in the foreground indicated that the thick, rather poorly bound
paint contained smalt mixed with lead-tin yellow. It is possible that, like Rembrandt,
Bol added smalt for its textural qualities: its properties as a drier would hardly have
been required…

…Driers might also be incorporated into the paint on the palette, as Rembrandt's
practice indicates: both de Mayerne and John Smith refer to the use of powdered.
calcined copperas (de Mayerne specifically mentions white copperas, zinc sulphate,
ZnSO4.7H2O; 'cop-peras' nowadays generally refers to the iron (II) sulphate,
FeSO4.7H2O, which is white when calcined) ... Verdigris, minium and umber were
also recommended ... Marshall Smith recommended the use of ground glass, which
was a not uncommon suggestion and interesting in view of Rembrandt's use of smalt
in pigment mixtures for its drying properties, mentioned above (note 53). A drier,
mixed into the paint or incorporated with the oil during preparation, must have been
used in the black paint of the sitter's sleeve in the ‘Portrait of a Young Woman with
her Hands Folded on a Book’, attributed to Willem Drost. The paint was in good
condition, with no evidence of cold flow or shrinkage, yet the linseed oil identified as
the binding material had not undergone any significant heat-bodying to assist in the
drying of the pigment…
 Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn,
Belshazzars’s feast
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/belshazzars-
feast-114372
 Ferdinand Bol,
Portrait of a young lady with a fan
http://www.the-athenaeum.org/art/full.php?ID=89023
 Willem Drost,
Portrait of a young woman with her hands folded on a book
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/portrait-of-a-
young-woman-with-her-hands-folded-on-a-book-114988
 Ferdinand Bol,
An Astronomer
http://www.wga.hu/support/viewer/z.html
…Certain pigments still did not dry successfully even with the aid of a heat-bodied
oil. Asphaltic or bituminous pigments are notoriously bad driers, encouraging long-
term cold flow of the paint film; this results in a characteristic craquelure or
'crocodiling'. These defects can be seen in the black paint of the sitter's gown in
Ferdinand Bol's ‘Astronomer’ ... The principal component of the medium was heat
pre-polymerised linseed oil, with a small amount of conifer resin. The treatment the
oil had received, however, was insufficient on its own to assist drying, for the paint
was also found to contain chemical components associated with triterpanes,
suggesting the presence of asphaltum or bitumen ... Under the microscope, brown
translucent particles of low refractive index, characteristic of asphaltum, were indeed
found to be present in a sample of the paint, mixed with bone black...

…Unlike Rembrandt, several of the painters in his circle appear occasionally to

have added small amounts of pine resin, in the form of varnish, to the
medium…

…Small quantities of other resins, such as sandarac or mastic, are sometimes

mentioned in the recipes collected by de Mayerne, but as yet these have not been
identified in the paint medium. Both spirit varnishes and those prepared using linseed
or walnut oil were available; given the tiny quantities in which the additions of
varnish, and thus pine resin, were made to the paint medium, however, it is
impossible to say which would have been used in any particular case where resin
has been detected...(note 58)…

…A good example of this practice is the final glaze on the red dress of the girl in ‘A
Young Man and a Girl playing Cards’ … which was found to contain linseed oil, with
some pine resin (indicated by the presence of 7-oxodehydroabietic acid) to provide
extra gloss and richness. The main body colour of the dress appears to be painted in
a mixture of red pigments, including transparent red lake pigment, a mixture similar
to that often used by Rembrandt himself ...
 Follower of Rembrandt,
A young man and a girl playing cards
http://luxfon.com/images/201202/luxfon.com_14986.jpg
…Because only small additions of resinous material were made to the paint it is
necessary to ensure that residual traces of any varnish removed during conservation
treatment, for example, are not mistaken for constituents of the paint medium…
…Ferdinand Bol made use of a rather more unusual resinous material in his ‘Portrait
of a Young Lady with a Fan’... The rich, glaze-like paint of the brownish shadow at
the top edge of the orange-brown curtain was in some ways reminiscent of an oleo-
asphaltic glaze, but without the paint-film defects associated with the liberal use of
such a material. The gas chromatogram … showed that the principal component of
the paint medium was heat-bodied linseed oil; the diterpenoid components, including
methyl Δ8-isopimarate, also present suggested that Bol used amber varnish in the
paint …

…During painting, volatile solvents might be used to moisten the brush,

particularly if the paint was too stiff ... They also appear to have been
employed to dilute blues, in particular, and also whites, so that the paint flowed
from the brush easily while retaining a clean colour because the solvent
evaporated so rapidly ... It is quite possible that a diluent of this type was used in
the rather thin greyish-blue paint of the cloudy sky over Juno's head in Pieter
Lastman's ‘Juno discovering Jupiter with lo’ ... The paint was much leaner than the
white highlight paint on a trailing stem of foliage on the right of the painting, although
both contained linseed oil…”

Note 53
“…Glass in general could well have contained traces of iron, manganese or lead, for
example; smalt contains cobalt, which is responsible for its blue colour. Compounds
of all these metals encourage drying…”
Note 58
“…There appears to have been a long tradition for the addition of resin, in the form of
varnish, to green glazes in particular; see, for example, G. B. Armenini, ‘De' veri
precetti della pit-tura’, Ravenna 1587, p. 126…”
 Pieter Lastman,
Juno discovering Jupiter with lo
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/juno-
discovering-jupiter-with-io-114646
 Jan Vermeer
Support and ground
The Guitar Player is unusual in never having been lined and so the original
canvas and strainer are visible. It is also possible to see that tiny wooden pegs
were used to attach the canvas to the strainer of the painting, rather than metal
tacks as used today.

The canvas was prepared with a coloured ground. The two National Gallery
paintings, [A young woman standing at a virginal] and [ A young woman seated
at a virginal], have very similar grounds, consisting of lead white combined with
chalk, earth pigments, bone black and charcoal black in a linseed oil binder...
Both have two layers: the lower is pale grey-brown; the upper, a light coloured
pinkish-brown containing a higher proportion of earth pigments and less black
than the lower layer. By contrast, 'The Guitar Player' and 'The Music Lesson'
(Royal Collection) have a single pale grey-brown layer rather similar in
appearance to the lower ground present in the National Gallery paintings. Some
of the inclusions of chalk and lead white are extremely large. This is particularly
notable in 'The Music Lesson' where some substantial agglomerates of lead white
(one measuring 175 x 120 μm is visible at the right side of the cross-section) and
chalk (the translucent fragment measuring 125 x 75 μm at centre left) are clearly
visible... This combination of lead white and chalk may be due to the common
practice of extending lead white which was described in contemporary sources.
For example, the 'De Mayerne' manuscript (1622–44) notes that the pigment
'céruse commune' is one part lead white combined with one part chalk.

The double ground of our two paintings may be suggestive of Vermeer’s desire to
change the colour of a pre-prepared canvas. This change could have been made
by Vermeer himself, or equally well, by the canvas supplier at Vermeer’s request.
Quick drying of a secondary ground would be crucial for the artist to commence
painting and 17th-century treatises describe methods to speed up the drying of
priming layers, suggesting a number of siccatives including lithage, minium, smalt
(cobalt in smalt acts as a drier)… varnish and earth colours (umber contains
manganese dioxide and functions as a catalyst to drying).
In this respect it is significant that areas rich in zinc and sulphur have been
identified in the upper ground layer of A young woman standing at a virginal...
Zinc sulphate (known in historic technical literature as zinc vitrol) was probably
added to this secondary ground layer since it was thought to speed up drying...

Helen Howard
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/research/meaning-of-making/vermeer-
and-technique/support-and-ground
Binding medium
Recent analysis of paint samples by researchers in the
Scientific department at the National Gallery using a
technique known as gas chromatography-mass spectrometry
(GC- MS) has shown that the binding medium of the ground
layer in Young Woman standing at a Virginal is a heat-bodied
linseed oil... A sample of dark-coloured paint obtained from
the background to the right of the chair at the lower right-
hand edge of the picture was also bound with a heat-bodied
linseed oil. In fact, linseed oil is by far the most common
binder found in 17th-century Holland and has been identified
at the National Gallery in works by Jan Steen and others.

The use of another binder, heat-bodied walnut oil, in 'Young

Woman standing at a Virginal' was also confirmed by
analysis. This was identified in a sample of white paint from
an area of thick impasto, depicting the light entering the
window at the upper left edge of the painting. Walnut oil was
considered to yellow less during ageing…and was therefore
traditionally recommended for use with pigments whose
colour was particularly affected by yellowing of the medium,
such as whites and blues. Although analysis of paint samples
from a variety of Dutch 17th-century works indicates that, in
practice, this advice was not always followed… the choice of
walnut oil as the binder for white paint has been observed in
samples from several paintings by Ferdinand Bol.

David Peggie
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/research/meaning
-of-making/vermeer-and-technique/binding-medium
 A young woman seated at a virginal
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/a-young-woman-
seated-at-a-virginal-114243
 A young woman standing at a virginal
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/a-young-woman-
standing-at-a-virginal-114245
 The guitar player
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/the-guitar-player-
191849
 The guitar player, detail
http://www.apollo-magazine.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/08/Featureimagecrop.jpg
 The music lesson
http://www.the-athenaeum.org/art/full.php?ID=74672
 The music lesson, detail
http://www.flickr.com/photos/centralasian/8121476836/sizes/o/in/ph
otolist-dnEG7G-dnEBKT/
National Gallery Technical Bulletin Volume 20, 1999: Painting
in Antwerp and London: Rubens and Van Dyck
Van Dyck's Paint Medium
Raymond White

“…it seems that for the paintings produced during the artist's period in England from
1632 until his death, linseed oil was his preferred medium. Walnut oil does occur, in
yellow paint on the subject's shot pouch in ‘William Feilding, 1st Earl of Denbigh’ (NG
5633) for example, but infrequently. Van Dyck used walnut oil to a greater extent in
the paintings produced in Italy, and also in those like ‘Charity’ … which were
produced in Antwerp and Brussels after his return from Italy in 1627. Sometimes the
oils were heat bodied; for example, heat-bodied walnut oil was used for George
Gage's black robe in ‘Portrait of George Gage with Two Attendants’ … painted while
the artist was in Rome. Heat-bodying in this instance would help to offset the
tendency of organic black pigments to inhibit the drying process in oil paints, often
causing paint film defects.
Van Dyck's discussion with de Mayerne on the use of an aqueous medium, such as
gum or glue, for blues (and mixed greens), followed by a varnish, has been
discussed ... [:] in so far as it was possible to examine passages of blue or green
paint, analysis of the paintings in the National Gallery Collection has revealed no
evidence whatsoever of this practice…

…Van Dyck added a trace of pine resin to the paint used for red glazed passages on
drapery. In addition there is evidence for the use of heated pine products, typically
softwood pitch, in brownish glaze paints from the ‘Portrait of George Gage’, The
Balbi Children’ … and the ‘Equestrian Portrait of Charles I’ ... Heating resins or resin-
containing materials was a typical way to produce translucent, brown-black tars and
pitches, which could be used in a similar way to asphaltum or bitumen.
Another variety of translucent brown, also produced by heating – not, in this case,
resinous material, but wood or bark – was bistre, a form of tarry soot. It was used in
‘William Feilding, 1st Earl of Denbigh’…”
Anthony van Dyck, Portrait of George Gage with Two Attendants
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/portrait-of-
george-gage-with-two-attendants-115015
 Anthony van Dyck, William Feilding, 1st Earl of Denbigh
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/william-feilding-
1st-earl-of-denbigh-116180
 Walnut Oil
Walnut Oil is cold pressed from fresh dried walnuts (Juglans
regia), and lightly refined. Yellows less than linseed oil, so it is
good for making pale oil colors and to make oil paint more fluid.
https://www.naturalpigments.com/walnut-oil.html
 Walnut Oil Gel
Walnut Oil Gel is a thixotropic painting medium made with walnut
oil and pyrogenic silica. Walnut Oil Gel is a clear pale amber gel
that adds transparency and thixotropic body to oil, resin-oil or
alkyd paint. Add directly to your paint to give it transparency
without thinning its consistency. Add pigments or extenders to
thicken it for creating impasto effects that do not sink in.
https://www.naturalpigments.com/walnut-oil-gel.html
http://www.maimeri.it/it/categorie/olio/prodotti-ausiliari/olii/olio-di-
noce-5834654.html