What Is Grisaille?
Grisaille is painting done entirely in shades of grey, or very close to it. Painters used it to imitate carved stone, to block in a picture before adding color, and sometimes as a finished work, when grey alone could carry the whole weight of a scene.
Take away color and you are left with light, shadow and form.
That is either a limitation or the purest test of skill.
Grisaille in one look
What it is: painting in greys, with little or no color.
The word: from the French gris, grey.
Use one: imitating carved stone and statues.
Use two: the grey underlayer beneath a colored painting.
Why it matters: it is pure light and form, with color stripped away.
Painting in shades of grey
Grisaille means working in a single range of greys, from near black to near white.
With no color to lean on, everything depends on value, the lightness or darkness of each tone. The painter has to build a convincing world out of grey alone, the same control of dark and light that drives chiaroscuro.
It looks austere. It is unforgiving. There is nowhere to hide.
Stone that is really paint
The oldest use of grisaille is a trick: making paint look like sculpture.
Painters rendered figures in flat grey so they seemed to be carved marble statues standing in niches. The most famous case is the closed exterior of a triptych, where the shut wings show grey, stone like saints. Then the altarpiece opens and the same world bursts into color and gold.
Van Eyck did exactly this on the Ghent Altarpiece. Closed, it looks like a wall of carved stone. Open, it blazes.
The grey skeleton under the color
Grisaille also hides inside many colored paintings, as the first layer.
Artists often blocked in the whole composition in grey first, fixing the light and shade, then floated thin, transparent colors on top in later layers. Long before oil, painters in tempera had already built form with grey and patient hatching. The grey did the structural work, the color did the singing.
This underpainting was sometimes called the dead colour, the quiet grey ghost beneath a finished oil. Get the grisaille right and the color almost paints itself.
When grey says more than color
Sometimes painters keep the grey on purpose, because color would say too much.
Stripped of color, a scene can feel like carved memory, grave and timeless, closer to sculpture or to newsprint than to a sunny afternoon. In the 20th century, painters reached for a grey palette to paint grief and war, when bright color would have felt obscene.
Grey is not the absence of color. It is a choice, and often a heavy one.
Common questions about grisaille
What is grisaille? Painting done in shades of grey, with little or no color.
Where does the word come from? From the French gris, meaning grey.
Why did painters use grisaille? To imitate stone sculpture, to underpaint in grey before adding color, and for sober finished works.
What is dead colour? The grey underpainting laid down before the colored layers in many oil paintings.
Is grisaille only grey? Mostly. Some versions use a narrow range of browns or other near neutral tones.
The wall of stone that opens into color
The clever thing about grisaille is how quietly it works.
On the closed Ghent Altarpiece, van Eyck painted saints so grey and solid they pass for carved stone, until the wings swing open and the same figures return in glowing color inside. Grey was the hush before the music, the proof that a painter who has mastered light needs no color at all to fool your eye.