What Is Grisaille?

Painting made almost entirely in shades of grey, used to fake carved stone, to underpaint in color, and sometimes as the finished picture itself.

Grisaille is painting in a single color, usually gray and sometimes brown. The painter works only with light and shadow, from almost white to almost black.

The result often looks like carved stone. Painters used it to imitate statues, to give engravers a model they could copy as a print, and to plan the lights and darks of a picture before the color went on.

Jan van Eyck, the Ghent Altarpiece, exterior with the wings closed, 1432. Saint Bavo Cathedral, Ghent.

The name is French, built on gris, "gray," and English borrowed it unchanged. Its first recorded use in English dates only from 1848, although painters had been working this way since the Middle Ages.

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The saints in the Vijd Chapel

Jan van Eyck, Saint John the Evangelist and the donor's wife, exterior of the Ghent Altarpiece, 1432. Saint Bavo Cathedral, Ghent.

One of the most famous grisailles is in Ghent, a city of Flanders, in present day Belgium…

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What You'll Discover

• Where gray painting began, before Van Eyck.

• How a painter turns gray into stone.

• Where grisaille ends and underpainting begins.

• What Bosch painted outside his Garden of Earthly Delights.

• The gray picture Bruegel kept for himself.

• Why Guernica has no color.

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