History of Pastel

History of pastels

The history of pastel can be traced back to the Sixteenth Century when Guido Reni, Jacopo Bassano, and Federigo Barocci were notable practitioners. Rosalba Carriera, 1675-1750 a Venetian lady artist was the first to make consistent use of Pastel. Chardin, 1699-1779 did portraits with a hatching stroke while Quentin de la Tour, 1704-1788, preferred the blended velvety finish. Thereafter, a galaxy of artists, Mengs, Nattier, Copley, Delacroix, Millet, Manet, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Redon, Vuillard, Bonnard, Glackens, Whistler and Hassam, just to list the more familiar names used Pastel as finished work rather than for preliminary sketches.

History of pastel

Technically pastel is powdered pigment, rolled into round or square sticks and contained by methyicellulose, a non-greasy binder. It can either be blended with finger and stump or left with visible strokes and lines. Generally, the ground is toned paper, but sanded boards and canvas are also popular. If the ground is covered completely with Pastel, the work is considered a Pastel Painting; a Pastel Sketch shows much of the ground. When protected by fixative and glass, Pastel is the most permanent of all media, for it never cracks, darkens or yellows.

History of pastel For a long period, fabricated sticks were probably made for or by artists on an ad hoc basis. In the seventeenth century, they came to be manufactured in commercially available sets that contained large arrays of coloured sticks that could be used to produce pastel paintings in a full range of colours and tones. Significantly, sets of sticks were manufactured from mixtures of ingredients selected to ensure that pigments of widely varying physical properties functioned homogenously in use. The letters of the Dutch poet and dramatist Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) and his father Constantijn (1596–1687), the Dutch mathematician, physicist, and astronomer, recount the difficulties these interested amateurs experienced in making a set of pastel sticks for "face painting" (or portraiture) that handled consistently, suggesting that pastel painting was then a novelty.

Edgar Degas 1834-1917-- remains the most important pastel painter we can study. He greatly advanced pastel's total range of effects. Degas was fascinated by the camera, cropping effects, Japanese woodcuts by masters Hokasai and Hiroshigek, flattened compositions, asymmetry and bright colours. Working to make his colours luminescent, he experimented with crosshatching, paints and pastel; he combined pastel with every medium, and surfaces of paper, cardboard and canvas. He mixed pastels with gouache and watercolour, and steamed them to soften pigments. With brushes, he manipulated colours and mediums, dipping pastels into prepared solutions and fixing each of the layers. He popularized the use and advanced the knowledge of fixatives. He drew and painted at the same time, constructing pictures, and enhancing illustration. Blindness finished his work in 1892. Degas pushed the envelope of pastel usage. Because of him, pastel was no longer considered a pale, pallid medium. Pastels have become popular in modern art because of the medium's broad range of bright colours and immediateness, ready to paint without any mixing of colours as in Oil paints and has fashioned the way forward for creative and modern art.

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