Gouache is a water-based paint that covers whatever lies beneath it.
It is made like watercolor, from pigment bound in a gum that dissolves in water. Extra binder and a white filler, chalk for instance, are mixed in to make it opaque.
In a watercolor, light passes through the thin color, bounces off the white paper and comes back, so the sheet seems to glow. Gouache hides the sheet.
That changes what a painter can do. With gouache, a light tone can go over a dark one. With transparent paint it cannot: a pale wash laid on a darker one barely shows.
The name is French and fairly recent, from the eighteenth century, but the paint itself is much older. European painters had been mixing opaque colors with water since the late fifteenth century, long before the word gouache existed.
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The most famous early example is rarely called gouache at all. It is the Young Hare by Albrecht Dürer, the German painter, made in 1502 and kept at the Albertina, a museum in Vienna. The animal sits on a bare ground, ears up and legs tucked under it, on a sheet about ten inches tall.
Dürer painted it in two stages. First came transparent brown washes, the base of the fur. Then he went over them with fine strokes, some of them in opaque white, to pick out single hairs and the light on the ears.
Catalogues therefore describe the sheet as watercolor and bodycolor, heightened with opaque white, meaning brightened in places. Bodycolor is the old English name for a water-based paint that covers. The method is gouache in everything but the name, which would not exist for another two centuries.
A word borrowed from Italian
Gouache comes from the Italian guazzo, literally a watering place…
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