Methods and Materials of Painting of the Great Schools and Masters

Book excerpt: Sir Charles Eastlake, a former president of the British Royal Academy and director of the National Gallery, was one of the world's foremost experts on the techniques of painting. A painter of considerable renown himself, he devoted years to traveling throughout England and Europe, where he searched through museums, monasteries, universities, and libraries, gradually amassing a collection of rare manuscripts from which he was able to reconstruct the technical secrets of the great painters of the past. In this comprehensive treasury (two volumes bound as one), Eastlake presents the results of his researches. He offers detailed discussions of Greek and Roman art methods, medieval techniques, tempera painting, the revolutionary use of oil paints by Hubert van Eyck, Flemish methods of preparing colors, and the methods of Reynolds and other 18th-century British masters. The second volume focuses on the technical secrets of members of various Italian schools, including such masters as Leonardo, Raphael, Perugino, Correggio, Andrea del Sarto, and many others. Rounding off the book are more than 100 pages of professional essays covering a wide range of subjects—from "Life in Inanimate Things" and "Neutral Tints in White and Other Draperies" to "Venetian Process" and "How to Compose and Paint a Single Head." Students, painters, art historians, and any lover of fine art will find Eastlake's work invaluable, both for its source material and its painstaking coverage of the technical evolution of painting. Dover (2001) unabridged republication in one volume of the work originally published by Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans in two volumes in 1847 as Materials for a History of Oil Painting.