Texture in art is the quality of a work's surface, either physical or only painted. Real texture is matter that could be touched, like thick paint or gold leaf. Implied texture is the illusion of fur, cloth or skin on a surface that stays flat.
The work where the difference shows best is Rembrandt's The Jewish Bride, painted around 1665 to 1669, where a sleeve is made of paint so thick that it looks as if it had been shaped with a palette knife.
A painter has two ways to give a picture a feel. He can build it out of material, or he can fake it with brushwork on a flat surface. Rembrandt built it, and within a generation the people who wrote about him were divided over whether that was a fault.
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Rembrandt's thick paint was already a complaint in the books written about him after his death. Arnold Houbraken, a painter from Dordrecht who published his lives of Dutch artists between 1718 and 1721, said Rembrandt once painted a picture so thick that it could be lifted off the floor by its nose. The paint looked smeared on, he wrote, with a house painter's brush or a bricklayer's trowel.
Gerard de Lairesse was blunter and warned painters off Rembrandt's example, because the paint ran down the work like dung. Both men wrote decades after Rembrandt died, but the thickness itself is documented. The Rijksmuseum says that in The Jewish Bride Rembrandt applies the paint thickly and scratches into it with the butt end of his brush.
A painter whose surface drew that much attention had to deal with visitors who stood too close. Houbraken also records what Rembrandt said to the ones who leaned in.
What did Rembrandt tell visitors about the smell of paint?
He told them to stay back…
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