On 11 September 1841 an American portrait painter patented a tin tube with a screw cap. Almost everything people love about the next fifty years of painting follows from it.

The painter was John Goffe Rand, born in New Hampshire, working in London, and not much remembered for his portraits. Before his tube, oil paint was stored in pig bladders that had to be punctured and then plugged, leaked constantly, and could not be carried far. After it, a painter could put a day’s colours in a coat pocket and walk out of the studio.

Renoir is supposed to have said that without the tubes there would have been no Impressionism. Whether or not he put it that way, the claim is sound. A movement built on changing light, observed on the spot, in one sitting, required paint that would travel and stay wet. The idea and the container arrived together.

This article takes that as its organising principle. The history of painting is usually told as a sequence of styles, which makes it sound like a succession of opinions. It is at least as much a history of what the materials would permit, and who could afford them.

Before oil: the media that would not wait

Fresco is pigment in water, brushed onto wet lime plaster. As the plaster cures, the colour becomes part of the wall. It is extraordinarily durable and almost entirely unforgiving, because the painter has to finish each patch before it dries. Italian workshops planned their days around this, laying only as much plaster as could be painted before evening, and the seams between those day-sections are still visible in raking light. Fresco produces confident, simplified, large-scale painting because it cannot produce anything else.

Egg tempera, pigment bound in yolk, dries within minutes and cannot be blended wet into wet. Its transitions have to be built from thousands of small strokes laid side by side. That is why fifteenth-century Italian panels have that particular crispness and why their flesh tones so often sit over a green underlayer: the method required the painter to decide the shadow before laying the light.

Oil, and the invention of second thoughts

Oil paint was not invented in fifteenth-century Flanders, but it was perfected there, and the difference it made is best understood as a difference in time. Oil stays workable for hours or days. It can be blended on the surface, scraped back, painted over, and built in transparent layers that let light travel down to a lower layer and back to the eye.

Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini portrait of 1434 is the usual exhibit, and for a good reason: the convex mirror on the back wall, the dog’s coat, the brass chandelier and the oranges on the sill are all doing something tempera could not do, which is describe how different surfaces handle light. The painting also carries an inscription above the mirror stating that van Eyck was present, which turns a portrait into a witnessed document.

What oil really introduced was revision. A painter could change their mind, and X-rays of old paintings are full of arms moved, heads turned, figures removed. Anyone who has watched a painter work knows that the finished picture is the last of many, and oil is the medium that made that possible.

Canvas, and the end of the immovable picture

Panel paintings are heavy, they crack along the grain, and they hate damp. Venice, built on water, moved early to canvas, and canvas changed the economics of the whole field. A stretched cloth can be made very large, rolled for transport, and produced cheaply enough that a painter can afford to fail.

That last point is underrated. The cost of a surface determines how experimental a painter can be, and the history of ambitious painting tracks the history of cheap supports with some precision.

Out of the studio

With Rand’s tube and with newly available synthetic pigments, painting went outdoors in the middle of the nineteenth century and came back changed. Working in front of the subject, in the time before the light moves, forces decisions: broader marks, colour laid next to colour rather than blended, shadow treated as coloured rather than as brown.

The result reads as informality and was in fact a discipline. If you want the long version of who did what and in what order, CreARTivity has a separate piece on the ten Impressionists who marked the world of painting. The point here is narrower: the style is inseparable from the equipment.

The other media, and what each one forbids

Watercolour

Watercolour is transparent and it does not forgive. The white is the paper, which means every light has to be planned and preserved rather than added at the end, and a passage once darkened cannot be recovered. This is why watercolour rewards speed and punishes fussing, and why it became the medium of travellers, naturalists and military surveyors before it became a medium of exhibition.

Acrylic

Water-based acrylics reached artists in the middle of the twentieth century, and their key property is drying time measured in minutes. That kills glazing and rewards flat, hard-edged, saturated colour, which is a fair description of a great deal of painting from the 1950s onwards. Acrylic also sticks to almost anything, which matters enormously for mural painting and for any tradition working on whatever support is available.

Digital

Digital painting removes drying time, material cost and the penalty for error at once. Undo is the significant feature, not the brush engine. When a mistake costs nothing, the relationship between decision and consequence changes, and the work that results tends to be either far more elaborate than a hand could sustain or far more provisional. Neither is a defect. It is what the medium permits.

What the movements were arguing about

Styles make more sense as positions in an argument than as fashions. The argument is always about what a painting is for.

Realism answers: to show what is there, including what patrons would rather not see. That second clause is why realism was political long before it was a technique.

Impressionism answers: to record perception rather than objects, which means recording the conditions, the hour and the weather.

Post-Impressionism, in Cezanne’s version, answers: to build a structure that holds together as a flat arrangement while still describing a mountain. The tension between those two obligations is the subject of his late work.

Cubism answers: to show that a single viewpoint was always a convention, by using several at once.

Abstraction answers: that a painting may be a fact rather than a picture of a fact.

Each of these is a refusal of the previous default, and each was received as incompetence before it was received as a position. That pattern is the most reliable thing in the history of painting, and it is worth remembering the next time something looks like a failure to do it properly.

Materials as a constraint, and as a decision

The Caribbean makes the argument of this article visible, because its painters have frequently worked with whatever was available.

Hector Hyppolite was painting on cardboard with chicken feathers when DeWitt Peters found him in the 1940s, and he had been painting house doors before that. Le Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince supplied brushes, board and paint to painters who had not had them, and the change in the work is visible. Masonite and enamel house paint shaped a great deal of Haitian painting: hard, opaque, unblended colour, strong outlines, no glazing.

The mistake, repeated for decades in the international market, was to read those qualities as innocence and to sell the work under the label naive. Some of it was constraint and much of it was choice, and the two are hard to separate from outside. Philome Obin painted the history of Cap-Haitien with the deliberation of a chronicler; there is nothing innocent about the decision to record a political killing in oil.

If you want the underlying argument about what counts as art and who gets to say, it is set out in our piece on applied art. If you want the practical skill of reading what is in front of you, start with how to read a picture.

Painters who changed what the others could do

A useful shortlist is not of the most famous painters but of the ones who left the field different from how they found it.

Jan van Eyck made oil do what it had not done, and every painter after him inherited the possibility of depth built in layers.

Caravaggio made light structural rather than descriptive: a single hard source, most of the canvas dark, and the composition carried by what is lit.

J M W Turner made weather the subject and dissolved the object into it, half a century before anyone was ready.

Paul Cezanne made the flatness of the canvas a problem to be solved rather than a fact to be hidden.

Georgia O’Keeffe made scale a tool of attention, enlarging a flower until it could no longer be dismissed as a flower.

Hector Hyppolite made ritual knowledge a subject that painting could carry directly, without translating it into European allegory first.

How a painting is actually built

Almost nobody is taught this, and it explains most of what you notice when a painting has aged.

The support comes first: panel, canvas, copper, masonite, paper, a wall, a door. It determines weight, size, and how the picture will fail in a century.

Then the ground, a prepared layer that seals the support and sets the tone the painting will be built on. A white ground makes colours sing and forces the painter to construct every shadow. A mid-toned or dark ground lets the painter work in both directions from the middle, which is faster and warmer, and is one reason seventeenth-century pictures often look as though they are lit from within a brown room.

Then the underdrawing, which infrared imaging now routinely recovers. It is the most revealing layer in any painting, because it shows the composition before the artist began to compromise.

Then the paint, usually lean layers first and fatter, oilier layers over them. Reverse that order and the surface cracks as the lower layers keep moving. A great deal of craquelure is simply a painter having been impatient.

Then varnish, which saturates the colours and protects the surface, and which yellows. Much of the golden glow people associate with old masters is varnish, and cleaning a picture regularly produces a public argument about whether the restorer has ruined it. What has usually happened is that a painting has been returned to a brightness its own century took for granted.

Knowing this sequence changes what you see. Craquelure, a visible ground at the edges, a pentimento, a tide line where an old varnish was removed: these are not damage so much as the record of how the object was made and what has happened to it since.

Who paid, and what that did to the pictures

Painting has never been free of its market, and the market has changed shape three or four times in a way that is written into the work.

Under commission, which covers most of European painting before about 1600, the subject, the size, the materials and often the number of figures were specified in a contract before a brush was lifted. Those contracts survive, and they are startling: they name the pigment grade, the deadline and the penalty. A painter under commission is a supplier meeting a specification, and the personal element is whatever they can smuggle past it.

Under the open market, which the Dutch Republic developed in the seventeenth century on a scale nobody had seen, painters produced before they had a buyer and had to guess at demand. That is where the specialist genres come from: the still life, the seascape, the tavern scene, the winter landscape. If you are painting speculatively, you paint what sells, and you get very good at one thing.

Under the dealer and critic system of the nineteenth century, the audience became an abstraction: a reputation, managed over time, for work whose value lay partly in being ahead of its buyers. This is the system that makes rejection legible as evidence of merit, and it is the origin of most of what people believe about artistic genius.

And under export demand, a fourth pattern appears, which the Caribbean knows well. When a local school of painting is discovered by an outside market, that market rapidly develops preferences, and the preferences feed back. Haitian painting after the 1940s had genuine international attention, and it also had visitors who wanted a particular kind of picture to take home. The strongest painters worked through that pressure and some of the work made under it is repetitive by design, because it was made to sell to people passing through.

None of this is a reason to be cynical about painting. It is a reason to ask, of any picture, who the first buyer was expected to be. The answer is usually visible in the size.

Where to start, specifically

In New Jersey, go to the Montclair Art Museum and spend the visit on George Inness, who lived in Montclair from 1885 until his death in 1894 and has the only gallery anywhere given over entirely to his work. His late paintings are the clearest available lesson in what oil can do that nothing else can: the edges are gone, the light is inside the paint rather than on top of it, and the effect is impossible in tempera, watercolour or acrylic.

Then find any painting where you can see the surface at an angle. Look for the places where the artist changed their mind. A pentimento, a shape showing faintly through a later layer, is the most human thing in a gallery.

For the Haitian material, look at a mid-century painting on masonite and notice what the support is doing: the hardness of the edge, the flatness of the colour, the absence of glaze. Then ask which of those was the board and which was the painter.

This article consolidates and replaces four shorter pieces previously published separately on the history of painting, types of painting, famous painters, and painting styles explained. The earlier URLs now redirect here.

Sources for dates and attributions: the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art on John Goffe Rand’s patent of 11 September 1841 for the collapsible paint tube; the National Gallery, London, on the Arnolfini portrait of 1434 and its inscription; the Montclair Art Museum on George Inness’s residence in Montclair from 1885 to 1894 and its Inness gallery; the Haitian Art Society and published accounts of Le Centre d’Art on Hector Hyppolite and Philome Obin.