Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice

Figure 5. Infrared photograph of Esaias van de Velde's Winter Landscape. National Gallery, London (6269).
broad areas of the cOmpOSltlOn, leaving the panel's thinly applied ground
visible in places. At this stage, the sky was painted with varying concentrations
of pale smalt (layers 2 and 3), and the details of the horizon were painted
wet-into-wet; fo rms in the foreground were sparsely indicated with tan and
gray-green underpaint. Over this underpainting the artist sketched out the
details of the image in a monochrome paint ranging from gray to black, then
completed the painting with a few touches of creamy mid-tones and final
highlights painted wet-into-wet. When the entire landscape was complete,
the artist superimposed the small figures over it, the human presence almost
incidental to the depiction of a raw winter's day.
The tonal landscape painters
At the end of the 1620s, Jan van Goyen and two other Haarlem artists, Pieter
Molijn and Salomon van Ruysdael, initiated a landscape style in which a
completely convincing representation of the Dutch countryside was rendered
in a deliberately limited, almost monochromatic palette. A work as late as van
Goyen's View oj Dordrecht Jrom the Dordtse Kil (1644) reveals the economy of
handling that typifies these works: a wet-into-wet application of the sky and
horizon, followed by a sketchy monochrome design only occasionally amplified
by rapid touches of lightly colored paint (Fig. 6) . The tone of the
wood and the grain pattern can be seen through the thin ground; both play
a role in the fmal image. The results of an earlier technical study established
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