METHODS AND MATERIALS OF PAINTING

Sir Charles Eastlake a former president of the British Royal Academy and director of the National Gallery was one of the world's foremost experts on the techniques of painting. A painter of considerable renown himself he devoted years to traveling throughout England and Europe where he searched through museums monasteries universities and libraries gradually amassing a collection of rare manuscripts from which he was able to reconstruct the technical secrets of the great painters of the past.In this comprehensive treasury (two volumes bound as one) Eastlake presents the results of his researches. He offers detailed discussions of Greek and Roman art methods medieval techniques tempera painting the revolutionary use of oil paints by Hubert van Eyck Flemish methods of preparing colors and the methods of Reynolds and other 18th-century British masters. The second volume focuses on the technical secrets of members of various Italian schools including such masters as Leonardo Raphael Perugino Correggio Andrea del Sarto and many others. Rounding off the book are more than 100 pages of professional essays covering a wide range of subjects from Life in Inanimate Things and Neutral Tints in White and Other Draperies to Venetian Process and How to Compose and Paint a Single Head. Students painters art historians and any lover of fine art will find Eastlake's work invaluable both for its source material and its painstaking coverage of the technical evolution of painting.