Oil paint stays soft for days. Painters used that delay to rework a picture on the canvas itself, and X-rays now find their first ideas under some of the best-known paintings in Western art. In one of them, a small animal added at the last minute has slowly sunk out of sight.
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How These Were Chosen
Oil paint is pigment mixed into a drying oil, usually linseed. Egg tempera, the paint used before it on panels, set in minutes, so each stroke had to be right at once. Oil gave painters weeks to blend colors on the canvas, scrape a passage off and start it again.
The same paint also changes with its thickness. Laid on thick, it keeps the marks of the brush. Thinned into a glaze, it lets the color beneath glow through. Laid on opaque, it can bury a whole first version.
Each picture here earns its place in one of two ways: a passage owes its effect to the way the oil was handled, or close study has caught the picture changing under the painter's brush.
12. Vincent van Gogh, Wheatfield with Cypresses (1889)
The clouds in this wheatfield are piled on so thickly that the paint still stands up in curls, and in places it has split open. Below them, ripe wheat runs across the canvas, a clump of dark cypresses on the right rises higher than anything else, and a band of blue hills, the Alpilles, closes the view.
The picture was made in September 1889 at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where Vincent van Gogh had admitted himself that May.
That September he could not go out to the fields. A relapse of his illness kept him confined to his room, so he painted Wheatfield with Cypresses indoors, working from a canvas of the same view that he had made outdoors at the end of June and that now hangs in New York. Of the two, he treated this second one, now in London, as the finished picture.
The two versions were made in very different ways. The summer canvas is built up slowly, in several thick layers laid one over another.
The London picture came about much faster. A close technical study published in 1987 concluded that it was probably painted in a single sitting, with the paint pressed straight from the tube onto the canvas and pushed around with the brush while still wet. Only a few touches went on afterwards.
Wheatfield with Cypresses has never been varnished, so the warm preparation still shows between the strokes.
The cracks in the clouds come from the white paint itself. Samples showed that almost all the white there is zinc white, which Van Gogh preferred to lead white because he believed it lasted longer. Zinc white dries slowly in oil, and where he piled it on pure, deep cracks with sharp edges have opened. Where he mixed it with cobalt blue, which helps oil to dry, the cracks stay small.
At a Glance
Artist: Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890)
Painted: September 1889, at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 72.1 × 90.9 cm (28.4 × 35.8 in)
Where to see it: The National Gallery, London, Room 43
About This Painting
Did Van Gogh paint cypress trees?
Yes. In late June 1889, in Provence, he decided to make cypresses the subject of one of his first series there, comparing their shape to an Egyptian obelisk and calling them "a splash of black in a sunny landscape." Besides this wheatfield and its outdoor first version, the series includes a close-up vertical canvas of the trees, and he repeated the wheatfield composition as a smaller gift for his mother and sister.
11. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Bal du Moulin de la Galette (1876)
Spots of pink and orange sunlight, dabbed in oil, fall through the leaves onto a crowd of young Parisians dancing, drinking and talking in an open-air garden. The garden belonged to the Moulin de la Galette, a Sunday dance hall at the top of Montmartre, the hill in the north of Paris.
In 1876 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, one of its most faithful regulars, decided to paint it on the spot, with the regulars themselves as his models. Many of the young women he asked said no.