Face

The front of something.

Facing

A preliminary technique in conservation and restoration, where tissue and adhesive are used to secure the paint layer (basically, holding it in place so that it does not crack or damage) before the structure of the painting is worked on.

Filling

A conservation and restoration technique, where putty is added to areas of paint loss, after which inpainting may begin.

Fine art

Objects to be enjoyed for primarily for their aesthetic merit rather than any practical purpose (although something like, say, a decorative pen may provide a tactile pleasure in its expertly-engineered ink flow, as well as being visually beautiful).  The term ‘fine art’ implies excellence, but all too often it is used in the same way that ‘exclusive’ is: to charge a high price for something very ordinary.  Fine art, like modern painting, is a term that means very little.

Fixative

A liquid, sprayed as a fine mist on to charcoal, soft pencil, chalk or pastel to prevent smudging.  Too heavy an application can flood and float the drawing away.  Caution should be exercised in the case of pastel, as the fixative can alter tone.

Foreshortening

A perspective technique, used to create the illusion of an object receding strongly into the distance or background.  This illusion is created by making the object appearing shorter than it really is, so as to seem compressed.  In so doing, for example, a human arm can seem to be reaching out from the canvas; though foreshortening effects are generally not so extreme, and are more regularly employed to give depth and solidity to the painting.  Foreshortening was one of the most important techniques in moving from the flat appearance and posture that humans have in medieval painting towards the appearance of three-dimensionality in the Renaissance.

Frame

A decorative and protective surround for a painting, usually made out of wood (though the elaborate decoration on frames is very often plaster).  Whether a frame includes a mount or glass will depend on the medium used: oil and acrylic generally will not have glass, nor will laminated poster art; watercolours will.

Fresco painting

Frescoes are painted with pigments ground in water and then applied directly on to a freshly-plastered wall: if the plaster is still moist, the method is called buon fresco; if the plaster is dried out, it is called  fresco secco.  The preliminary drawing is executed on the under-plaster (arriccio); it is usually brushed-in with sinopia.   The artist then paints into the top layer of plaster (intonaco). While frescoes are particularly associated with Renaissance artists, the earliest examples are Minoan; some very early examples are painted on small plaster panels rather than walls, so that they could travel with their owner.

Follower of

This describes a work painted by an artist who was alive at the same time or later as a more famous artist, and painted in the same style as that more famous artist.  To be a ‘follower of’ implies a greater level of skill than being an imitator of.

Frottage

The technique of taking a ‘rubbing’ (i.e. the result of rubbing a pencil, crayon or similar implement across a sheet of paper), where the paper is laid over an uneven (usually brass) surface, in order to capture an impression of the brass object’s surface on the paper.

Genre painting

Everyday scenes of human activity, often painted on a small scale.  Dutch painting is especially concerned with genre painting.

Gesso

A mixture of a plaster and glue, applied to panels and providing a hard, smooth, ivory-white surface on which to paint.  The first, coarse coat of gesso is the gesso rosso; two or three days later the fine coats (gesso sottile) may be applied.

Gesturalism

The use of energetic, expressive brushstrokes that are intended to suggest the sweeping motions of the artist’s arm.  It is especially associated with Van Gogh.  See brushwork.

Glaze

A thin, transparent or semi-transparent layer on a painting which modifies the appearance of the underlying paint, giving a deeper, shinier look to the underlying colour.  When applied to only part of the painting, it helps to create variety of effect.

Gold ground

A ground either covered or partially covered in gold leaf.  The underlying ground is gesso, on top of which is brushed a thin coating of Armenian Bole.  Next, an adhesive is applied (normally egg-white with a little water), and then thin gold-leaf is picked up on a wide, soft, hair brush (called a tip) and laid in position.  Before it fully hardens, decorative work can be inscribed with patterned iron or steel dies; and when fully hardened a burnisher produces the final sheen. Tempera is best for working on gold, as oil often has adhesion problems.  Gold ground is especially associated with icons.

Gouache

Similar in composition to watercolour paint, but with a higher pigment content that renders it opaque.

Grading

Deploying a watercolour wash to achieve a lightening or darkening effect as the colour flows down the paper, achieved by adding more water (for lightening) or less (for darkening) to the brush.

Granulation

An effect that can be achieved with washes when using colours with heavy pigment particles, so that the pigment clings to the texture of the paper and produces a ‘granular’ or grainy effect, rather than a smooth one.

Graver

Or burin: a hard steel instrument used to cut into a metal or wood surface.  See etching and woodcut.

Grisaille

A monochrome painting executed in shades of grey, its name being derived from the French word ‘gris’, meaning ‘grey’.

Ground

The surface coating on which the paint is applied: e.g. gesso is the ‘ground’ for a panel.

Gum

A binder: for watercolour, the binder is Gum Arabic; for chalks and pastels it is gum tragacanth.

Gutenberg Press

The first movable type printing system to be developed in Europe, named after its inventor, Johannes Gutenberg.  Using cast-metal type-pieces instead of woodblocks, his press was faster and more durable than his competitors, as well as producing superior results.  The most famous work produced, The Gutenberg Bible (1455) was a huge success, and surviving copies are among the most valuable books in the world today.  For our purposes, the relevance of the Gutenberg Press is the effect it had on illuminated manuscripts: ruinously-expensive manuscripts became far less fashionable, and the art-form of manuscript became marginal.  The same fate befell calligraphy in Europe generally, though it has remained more popular elsewhere.

Paint loss

A euphemism for damage, referring to paint that should be there, but is not.  It can be addressed through filling and inpainting, where the restorer ‘paints in’ what had been there before the paint layer was damaged.

Palette

An artist’s choice of colours.  Today, this can be pretty much anything, but in the past the artist was restricted by a much smaller number of available pigments.  It is possible therefore to talk about, for example, a Renaissance palette as opposed to a Dutch Painting (Golden Age) palette; and, indeed, to talk about an artist’s palette across their whole body of their work.  Renaissance artists used judicious underpainting to make the best of the limited pigments they had access to.  More mundanely, the palette is also the board an artist mixes their paints on, and a palette knife is used to clean the palette board, or mix the paints.

Panel

Until canvas became used in the 15th century, this was the main support for a painting.  Panels are generally made from wood, and are still used today as they are cheaper and less trouble to prepare than canvas; plus their smoothness (after a ground has been applied) permits finely-detailed work.  Traditionally, French painters preferred oak, Italians white poplar, and Germans pine; though all sorts of woods of varying quality have been used.

Pantograph

A set of folding measuring sticks used to scale a drawing up or down, used since the 17th century.  When unfolded, a pantograph looks something like a piece of trellis fencing used in gardens.

Paper

Paper only became used in Europe from the 12th century, though it had been developed in China a millennium earlier.  Today, artists’ paper falls into two categories: cartridge and rag.  The former is made from wood-pulp and is generally used by draughtsman.  Rag paper is produced from cotton or linen rags and finished to offer three different three surfaces: hot pressed (a smooth, slightly shiny surface); not (a matt finish) and rough (coarse-grained).  Paper tints range from black to white, and commonly also pale creams and greys.  There are also heavily-textured papers such as Cox, de Wint, Ingres, and Turner, each assisting the artist to produce different effects.

Papyrus

A form of paper used by the Egyptians.  It was made from the reed cyperus papyrus: strips were overlaid each other, soaked with water, pounded, and finally dried.

Parchment

Treated animal skin (for example vellum, the premier parchment, which is made of calf skin): it was the principal support for writing until paper came to Europe in the 12th century.

Pastel

Sticks of dry colour with a minimum of binder, so as to keep their bright, fresh impressions almost indefinitely.  They are made from pure pigment mixed with an inert filler and a small amount of gum tragacanth, casein or skimmed milk.  The pastel stick’s shape is formed by a pressure mould.  Pastels are used much like chalks, and were much beloved by Degas (think of his ballerina pictures).  Pastel works are fragile: particles of colour can fall off the paper if it is violently transported, and fixatives generally do not help as they change the tone and tints.

Pen

A drawing and writing implement with a long history: Saint Isidore of Seville described a quill-pen in the 7th century, and the hand-cut quill (the feather taken from birds such as geese, swans and turkeys) was the main ink drawing instrument until the 19th century.  Steel nibs started to appear late in the 18th century, and by the mid-19th had replaced quills; the earliest example of a metallic pen, however, was found at Pompeii.  Oriental pen and ink art is still produced using traditional pens cut from thin bamboos.

Pen and ink

As it sounds, this is work produced with an ink pen on paper, perhaps incorporating techniques such as washes.  Famous pen and ink artists include the children’s illustrator Edward Ardizzone and illustrator Sidney Paget (of Sherlock Holmes fame).

Pencil

Pencils as we now know them (essentially, wooden sticks with a graphite core) were first produced in Britain and date from the end of the 17th century; though it was the French inventor Nicolas-Jacques Conté (1755-1805), who developed the process of mixing a clay with the graphite to produce a range of hard and soft pencils.  The same man was responsible for the Conté crayon.

Pentimento

From the Italian for ‘repentance’, a ‘pentimento’ is detail in an artwork since painted over by the artist (hence ‘repentance’ in the sense of the artist changing their mind).  This could be a repositioning of the main figures (as in Caravaggio’s The Cardsharps), or perhaps a detail that has been painted out in the final version.  Today, pentimenti are usually identified by multi-spectral imaging; but if the top layer of the medium (usually oil) acquires a higher refractive index it can become more transparent, and allow the naked eye to see the earlier version underneath.

Perspective

The illusion of making a two-dimensional painting look as though it is three-dimensional.  There are two basic techniques: linear perspective uses converging lines and vanishing points (as in the technical drawing children learn in school) so that objects that are supposed to be far away are painted proportionately smaller, and closer objects proportionately bigger.  Aerial perspective (also called atmospheric perspective) uses colour and detail: objects that are far away look cooler or bluer, will be less detailed, and painted with softer edges.  Perspective as we now think of it is essentially a Quattrocento invention: medieval paintings and earlier look ‘flat’ by comparison.

Pigment

The thing which gives a paint its colour.  Now that there are so many artificial pigments, paint exists in any imaginable colour; but earlier artists were much more restricted.  Indeed, Renaissance artists were still using chalks with the same mineral pigments used in the Stone Age, and their range of pigments was hardly changed from the Medieval period.

Priming layer

The layer between the ground and the paint, which helps to seal the ground.  Not every work with a ground has a priming layer, though without it the finished work may appear too matt.

Print

A facsimile of an original work.  A print can be made by a myriad of methods both manual and automatic (see lithograph and mezzotint, for example) but unless otherwise stated the print will be an inexpensive method worked onto inexpensive materials.  Also, unless it is a limited edition, the number of prints available will be unlimited (and if unlimited it is properly called an open edition).

Pochade

A quick sketch of a landscape made in the open air; perhaps to be used as a reference for a more detailed work that the artist will paint in their studio.  Artists who paint outdoors usually bring a pochade box, which is a suitcase like container that will hold the artist’s materials (easel, etc.) and protect the sketch against the weather while the artist is working.

Portrait

A work where the main subject is a person, or a group of persons.  If the person shown is the artist who painted the picture, it is called a self-portrait: Rembrandt famously painted himself throughout his life, and is one of a number of artists whose face we can see age as their career progressed.  ‘Portrait’ also refers to a painting’s dimensions: it is ‘portrait’ if it is taller than it is wide, and ‘landscape’ if it is wider than it is tall.  It is therefore possible to have a group portrait which is, confusingly, landscape-shaped.  Happily, few sitters are fat enough to require landscape-shape on their own account.

Poster art

Art that advertises.  The modern form of the poster dates back to the 1840s when colour lithographs reached the point that they could be mass-produced, but the high-point of poster art was in Paris in the 1890s (think of Toulouse-Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge posters).  Decorative posters for the home are not poster art in the traditional sense of the term, as they are not trying to sell anything to the public: posters for the home are better thought of as a type of print.

Poster paint

Or poster colour: a cheap distemper paint that uses Gum Arabic or glue size as its binder.  Because it is a cheap paint and generally the first that children try, there is a certain amount of snobbery attached to poster paint, but it produces bold, bright effects that catch the eye from a distance.

Provenance

Where a painting has been.  A ‘distinguished’ provenance denotes a history of being shown in a respected exhibition, owned by a noteworthy collector, sold by a reputable auction house or gallery (perhaps all of the above); at any rate, where the picture has been is properly documented.  Such provenance will add considerably to its value, not least because it reduces the risk of buying a forgery.

Tempera

A medium where the pigments are mixed with a water-soluble binder.  Some say that unless the binder is egg yolk, it is not true tempera; but others will allow that different parts of the egg, casein, glue and gelatine count just as well.  It is a durable medium, but has been largely replaced by oil painting.

Tenebrism

Quintessentially used by Caravaggio – but also by artists such as Georges De La Tour and, later, Joseph Wright of Derby –  this is a dramatic effect where the majority of the painting will be dark, and only one or two areas painted brightly, to create strong contrast and draw the eye to the highlighted parts.  The word derives from ‘tenebroso’ or ‘murky dark’, though the effect is perhaps better summed up through the Latin ‘tenebra’, or ‘shadow’.  Tenebrism is strongly associated with chiaroscuro, and while both will result in predominantly dark paintings, there is a significant theoretical difference between the two: chiaroscuro is a shading technique adopted to give an appearance of solidity; tenebrism is not concerned with making the picture appear three-dimensional, but only with dramatic effect.

Textiles

Woven fabrics used for painting: most obviously linen and cotton canvas, but also cambric, silk, hessian, sailcloth, sacking and synthetics.  They all call for some form of grounding with an oil, glue or acrylic-bound primer.

Tint

The opposite of shade: tints are created by mixing a colour with white; shades are created by mixing it with black.

Tondo

Referring to a painting which is round in shape, from the Latin ‘rotundus’, meaning ‘round’.

Tone

The lightness or darkness of the colour used.

Tortillon

Rolled-up paper used for blending pastel, chalk or charcoal.  It may also be used for mopping small areas when using watercolour paint.

Tragacanth

A gum binder used in watercolour paints and pastels.

Transferring

Probably the most specialist of the available conservation and restoration techniques: this involves removing the original support and transferring the paint and/or ground layer to a new support.  It can be furiously expensive to perform.

Trecento

Italian works, dated between 1300 and 1400.  Giotto, credited above all with ushering in the Renaissance, painted in this period.

Trompe l’oeil

Literally in French to ‘deceive the eye’, this is illusionistic painting intended to create a three-dimensional image from its two-dimensional support (see for example the delightfully-titled Escaping Criticism by Pere Borrell del Caso, 1874, where a boy appears to be climbing out of the picture frame).  The techniques used to create trompe l’oeil effects are many and various, but see for example foreshortening.  Also, compare quadratura.