Glossary

Art that does not depict recognisable objects, relying instead on colour, line and form.

Official art institutions such as the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, which set strict rules of training and a hierarchy of subjects, dominating European taste for centuries.

A representation in which figures or objects stand for abstract ideas such as liberty, justice or time.

Appears in: Liberty Leading the People

A religious painting placed above or behind a church altar, often made of several panels.

A deliberately distorted image that appears correctly only from a particular angle or in a curved mirror.

Appears in: The Ambassadors

A decorative style of about 1890–1910 known for flowing, plant-like curves, found in architecture, design and painting.

Appears in: The Kiss

Suggesting distance by making far-off things paler, bluer and less distinct.

Appears in: Mona Lisa

Placing strokes of different colours side by side instead of mixing them on the palette, so that the eye blends them.

Appears in: Impression, Sunrise

Linen or cotton stretched over a wooden frame; from the sixteenth century it gradually replaced wooden panels as the main support for oil painting.

Italian for “light–dark”: the use of strong contrasts of light and shade to model form and create drama.

Appears in: Judith Beheading Holofernes · The Night Watch

A style of flat areas of colour enclosed by dark outlines, inspired by cloisonné enamel and stained glass; used by Gauguin and others.

Appears in: Vision after the Sermon · The Starry Night · Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

The tradition, rooted in Venice, that treats colour rather than drawing as the foundation of painting, in contrast to the Florentine emphasis on design.

Appears in: Venus of Urbino

Pairs of colours opposite each other on the colour wheel, such as blue and orange or red and green; side by side they intensify each other.

Appears in: Impression, Sunrise · Café Terrace at Night · The Starry Night

A stance in which the weight rests on one leg, so that shoulders and hips tilt in opposite directions; derived from ancient Greek sculpture.

The fine network of cracks that forms in paint and varnish as they age.

The Neo-Impressionist theory of separating colour into distinct strokes of pure hue to be mixed optically; pointillism is one technique of it.

Appears in: A Sunday on La Grande Jatte

French for “in the open air”: painting outdoors, directly from the subject in natural light.

An early twentieth-century movement using distortion and intense colour to express subjective emotion rather than objective reality.

Appears in: The Starry Night · Wheatfield with Crows · The Scream

A genre invented by Watteau, showing elegantly dressed couples at leisure, courting and making music in parkland.

Shortening the depiction of an object that extends towards the viewer, to create an illusion of depth.

Appears in: The Supper at Emmaus

Painting with water-based pigments on wet lime plaster; the colour binds as the plaster dries, making it very durable, but each section must be finished before it sets.

Appears in: The Last Supper · The School of Athens

Painting of scenes from everyday life, especially popular in the seventeenth-century Netherlands.

Appears in: The Milkmaid

A white ground of chalk or gypsum mixed with glue, applied to panels or canvas to prepare the painting surface.

Applying thin, transparent layers of paint over dry paint; light passes through and reflects back, giving colours depth and glow.

Appears in: The Arnolfini Portrait · The Ninth Wave

Gold beaten into extremely thin sheets and applied to a surface, common in medieval religious art and used extensively by Klimt.

Appears in: The Kiss

The journey through Italy and elsewhere undertaken by young European aristocrats in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries to study classical culture.

Large-scale painting of historical, mythological, religious or literary narratives, ranked by the academies as the highest form of art.

A mid-nineteenth-century American school of landscape painting, founded by Thomas Cole, that depicted the wilderness on a grand, often spiritual scale.

Appears in: The Course of Empire: Destruction

The study of the meaning of figures, objects and symbols in art, such as keys identifying St Peter.

Applying paint thickly so that brush or knife marks stand out from the surface.

Appears in: Sunflowers · The Starry Night

The late nineteenth-century European craze for Japanese art; the flat colour and bold compositions of ukiyo-e prints deeply influenced the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists.

Appears in: Almond Blossom

A mathematical system in which parallel lines converge on a Vanishing point, creating three-dimensional space on a flat surface; formalised by Brunelleschi in the early fifteenth century.

Appears in: The Last Supper · The School of Athens

A printmaking method in which the image is drawn with greasy crayon on a flat stone and printed using the repulsion of oil and water; widely used in the nineteenth century for newspaper illustration and posters.

Appears in: The Third-Class Carriage

Art by painters without formal training, typically with flat composition, bright colour, meticulous detail and space that ignores perspective.

Appears in: The Sleeping Gypsy

Mondrian's theory of art using only horizontal and vertical lines, the primary colours and black, white and grey, in pursuit of pure, universal harmony.

Appears in: Composition II in Red, Blue and Yellow

Pigment bound in a drying oil such as linseed; it dries slowly, allowing layering and revision, and gives rich, saturated colour.

Appears in: The Arnolfini Portrait

The nineteenth-century European fashion for depicting North Africa, the Middle East and the Ottoman world, often steeped in exotic fantasy and stereotype.

Appears in: The Massacre at Chios

Italian for “repentance”: traces of an earlier composition that the artist painted over, which may show through with age or under X-ray.

Appears in: The Painter's Studio

The coloured powder, mineral, organic or synthetic, that is mixed with a binder to make paint.

Building an image from small dots of pure colour that blend optically when seen from a distance; developed by Seurat.

Appears in: A Sunday on La Grande Jatte

An artistic brotherhood founded in London in 1848 that rejected the academic cult of Raphael, pursuing bright colour, minute observation of nature and literary subjects.

Appears in: Ophelia

Arranging figures in a stable triangle, common in the High Renaissance, giving a sense of balance and solemnity.

Appears in: Mona Lisa

German for “figure from behind”: a person seen from the back contemplating a view, inviting the viewer to share their gaze; a hallmark of Friedrich.

Appears in: Wanderer above the Sea of Fog

The official annual or biennial art exhibition in Paris; acceptance or rejection could make or break an artist's career.

Groups of artists in the German-speaking world who broke away from conservative official associations in the late nineteenth century; the Vienna Secession is the best known.

Italian for “smoky”: very thin layers of paint that soften outlines and transitions of tone, without hard lines; perfected by Leonardo.

Appears in: Mona Lisa

A painting of inanimate objects such as flowers, food or vessels.

A late nineteenth-century movement that used symbol and suggestion to express dreams, mystery and the spiritual.

A style developed by Gauguin and Émile Bernard in Brittany around 1888, “synthesising” observation, memory and feeling into flat areas of colour and simplified outlines rather than copying nature.

Appears in: Vision after the Sermon

Paint made by binding pigment with egg yolk; it dries fast with clear colour, and was the main panel medium before oil became widespread.

Appears in: The Birth of Venus

An extreme form of chiaroscuro in which most of the picture is plunged into darkness and only the main figures are lit, as in Caravaggio.

Appears in: The Calling of Saint Matthew · The Supper at Emmaus

An eighteenth-century aesthetic idea: the mixture of awe and terror felt before vast or overwhelming natural forces.

Appears in: The Monk by the Sea · Wanderer above the Sea of Fog · The Ninth Wave

A work made of three panels, the outer two usually hinged so they can close.

French for “deceive the eye”: painting so realistic that it seems to be the real object.

A blue pigment ground from lapis lazuli mined in Afghanistan; historically more expensive than gold.

Appears in: Girl with a Pearl Earring · The Starry Night

The preparatory drawing made on the ground before painting, now visible through infrared reflectography.

In linear perspective, the point at which parallel lines appear to converge.

The use of skulls, hourglasses, guttering candles and similar objects to remind the viewer of the brevity of life and the emptiness of worldly things.

Appears in: The Ambassadors

A transparent protective coating over a painting; it yellows and darkens with age and is often removed in restoration.