Impasto

Origins in oil

Impasto became technically possible only with the slow-drying oil medium developed in fifteenth-century Northern Europe. Titian in his late years (1560s–70s) was the first major painter to exploit thick paint as an expressive end in itself, building up the surface of his last canvases with broken, scumbled layers in which the underpainting still glimmers through. Vasari reportedly said his late style required much labour and could not be painted at one go.

Rembrandt's signature

Rembrandt made impasto the vehicle of his mature style. In paintings like the Self-Portrait with Two Circles (c. 1665–69), the highlights on the forehead and the nose are laid on so thickly that they cast their own small shadows. The viewer sees both the depicted face and the physical sediment of the act of painting at once.

Modern revivals

From Vincent van Gogh's wheatfields and starry skies — where the entire surface is built from raised twisted ridges of pigment — to Frank Auerbach's portrait heads, where paint is sometimes piled an inch deep, impasto runs through modern painting as a way to make the surface itself a subject. Anselm Kiefer extends the principle by mixing actual materials (lead, straw, ash) into his paint.

How to recognise it

Look at the painting from the side or in raking light. If you can see physical hills and valleys of paint, you are in impasto territory. Impasto is most often used selectively — heavy in the highlights, thinner in the shadows — to give modeled forms a tangible presence.

Related techniques

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