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, but with more binder and an added white filler, such as chalk, that makes it opaque. A watercolor lets the paper glow through its colors. Gouache hides the paper, and that one difference allows a painter to lay a light color over a dark one, which pure watercolor does poorly, since a pale wash laid over a darker one barely shows.
The name is French, and it appeared only in the eighteenth century. The paint is older. Painters had been using opaque colors mixed with water since the late fifteenth century, and in English these are called bodycolor.
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The most famous early picture painted this way is rarely called gouache at all. Albrecht Dürer's Young Hare, painted in 1502, belongs to the Albertina in Vienna, and the museum's catalogue describes it in German as Aquarell und Deckfarben, mit Deckweiß gehöht: watercolor and bodycolor, heightened with opaque white.
Dürer built the animal in transparent washes, then laid opaque white over them, a light that watercolor alone could not have given him. The method is gouache in everything but the name, which would not exist for another two centuries.
Four and a half centuries later, the same paint gave its colors to The Snail, a very large work from Henri Matisse's last years, made in 1953. Who brushed that paint onto the paper is another story.
What You'll Discover
Where the word gouache really comes from.
How a turkey reached an emperor's painter.
What travelers carried home from Naples.
What Turner did with it on blue paper.
Whose hands painted the colors of The Snail.