Although art history is often presented in the west as a long list of progressive achievements of individual artists, most creative leaps in art are due to broader technological innovations that have happened through slow collective efforts. This post is about the advent of oil painting and the unique and under-appreciated historical role of the humble flax plant.
Fortunately, artists no longer have to carry pigment around in pig bladders or grind their own dusty toxic powders into paint. Painting has become more accessible, more enjoyable and easier throughout the centuries. From the use of oil as a binder in the 15th century to the 17th century chemical revolution that unlocked so many super-saturated synthetic pigments, the continuing increase in the technical convenience of painting has enabled a lot of creative breakthroughs along the way. And while there’s no real teleology—it isn’t as if modern oil or acrylic painting was ever a goal of a bunch of random historical incidents—it is true that particular kinds of paint lend themselves more naturally to particular kinds of mark-making, and that artists are always seeking to build on traditions of the past. It’s no coincidence that painted forms became more volumetric and richer almost immediately after the advent of a most magical substance: oil paint.
My writing will reveal my own personal bias toward oil paint. I’m not alone. Like many other artists today and in the last few hundred years I have tried egg tempera and encuastic and acrylics. I didn’t “discover” oil painting until I was in my late twenties. Although I had been drawing and painting and working with other media since childhood, after my first couple silky smooth adventures in oils I never looked back. Oil paint is awesome. And when oil painting burst onto the scene a few centuries ago it was awesomely disruptive.
But before we get into how and why putting oil in oil paint was so transformational we’ve got to quickly answer the question “What is paint?” Don’t worry this will be quick: paint is colored liquid that gets applied to a surface. Most paint is remarkably simple; it has two ingredients:
the pigment (the stuff that gives it color) and
the binder (the stuff that makes it liquidy)
As it turns out the binder is extremely important to determining how the paint will behave. A few times in human history, switching out the binder resulted in massive shifts in how painted images were created and consumed. To understand how incredibly innovative the use of oil as a binder in paint really was, again we have to go backwards and first got to consider the particular qualities of the two kinds of painting that were most prevalent for centuries before oils became widely adopted: egg tempera and encaustic painting (wax painting).
Egg tempera
If you try to make a painting with egg tempera or wax you likely immediately understand a lot about art history. While there are artists today that work in egg tempera or encaustic (wax) media, for a lot of artists oil or acrylic paint is just easier to handle. Here’s what I mean. Creating an egg tempera of the sort that medieval and byzantine artists made requires grinding raw pigment, mixing it into an egg yolk, and making one stroke on a surface at a time. Each stroke dries almost immediately—almost like a drop of runny yolk hitting a hot skillet—and the strokes sometimes add up to have a chalky appearance. A painting consists of hundreds or thousands of painstakingly considered strokes that for centuries created beautiful but relatively flatly-rendered paintings. And because tempera paint cracks easily on fabric surfaces, substrates were often small wooden panels, or many wooden panels that were connected.
Encaustic (wax painting)
The Egyptians had tremendous success rendering both with tempera and also with wax as a binder. This type of wax painting is called encaustic. But again the difficulties are considerable. You need to heat the wax up (today many artists use a skillet) in order to make marks with it. Just as with tempera, encaustic paint dries almost immediately as it hits the surface, like a drop of candle wax on a wooden table. And because wax is somewhat translucent you’ve got to consider how light travels through the wax.
Neither egg tempera nor encaustic painting lend themselves easily to creating a buttery smooth surface or areas of highly opaque and saturated color. To do that, oil or acrylics are best. Here is a detail from one of the world’s best known early oil paintings:
Oil Painting
Oil was used as a binder in paint by cultures around the world for centuries, but often only small amounts or with other components like encaustic. Flemmish artist Jan van Eyck generally gets the credit for kick-starting the global adoption of oil painting. Jan and his brother Hubert (who died before it was completed) created the Ghent Altarpiece (1432), a giant wooden thing that folds open like a screen. The altarpiece is an undeniable masterpiece of painting. This painting kicks ass in large part because the linseed oil allowed for longer drying times (think of a grease stain as compared to a ketchup stain). Jan and Hubert were able to push their colored grease around on those wood panels and were able to use the linseed oil to create thin layers of colored glaze, too. Brushstrokes are barely evident. Just look at those round foreheads! When other painters saw the success artists were having with oils, it wasn’t long before they too happily traded their egg yolks and wax for linseed oil and other oils as well.
Of course this is an overly simplistic narrative. Here are some caveats. First, it’s not necessarily the case that naturalistic paintings are better paintings—only that they were rare before the use of oils. Additionally, Michelangelo and others were using tempera to create underpaintings and then painting on top of the tempera with oils.1 And Leonardo and others were mixing both egg and oil together. And some of those tempera paintings were as naturalistic as anything that’s been done with oils. But you get the idea: it’s no coincidence that paintings became larger and more volumetric just as oils were widely adopted. Oil painting was a revolution and it was, well, oil that enabled it.
For the last five hundred years or so, the most commonly used oil in oil paint comes from the flax plant Linum Usitatissimum and is called linseed oil (painters have also used walnut and poppy seed oils and continue to, although not as frequently as linseed). Although oil was used for centuries to light lamps, cook food, and to mix with other binders in paint, it wasn’t until artists started mixing more of it into their pigments and largely foregoing other binders that oil painting as we know it began to emerge. The trajectory of larger, richer and more volumetric paintings was accelerated still when artists began painting on linen rather than wooden panels. As it turns out linen is also made from the flax plant, specifically from the fibers from the stem.
So there you have it. The flax plant is the unsung hero the Renaissance and indeed of painting history, as important as Leonardo or Michelangelo or any of the early innovators of naturalistic painting. It is a remarkable fact of ecology that flax even exists. Without the oil from this tiny seed, how different would our world be? Our history books? Our contemporary images?
Ranquet, O., Duce, C., Bramanti, E. et al. A holistic view on the role of egg yolk in Old Masters’ oil paints. Nat Commun 14, 1534 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-36859-5