As Leslie Carlyle points out in The Artist's Assistant: Oil Painting Instruction Manuals and Handbooks in Britain 1800-1900 with Reference to Selected Eighteenth-Century Sources (a revised and expanded edition of her doctoral dissertation), the exchange and transmission of information among artists on the technical aspects of their calling have been carried on through mostly an "oral tradition," with some further enlightenment provided through artists' diaries, letters, and the occasional published article. In the nineteenth century in England, however, a remarkable number of books and pamphlets having to do with oil painting were published, following on the heels of a large body of work published in the previous century. This book contains remarkable scholarship of the highest order. It provides a wealth of information about the development of English oil painting in an accessible and readable way, and each chapter concludes with an extensive list of notes and references. Its story, to me at least, reveals that two hundred years ago artists and manufacturers were dealing thoughtfully and thoroughly with their materials. This is a reference that should be in every art-history library. It will prove an especially valuable resource for conservators who do research in order to treat nineteenth-century English paintings. --Publisher description

Excerpt from On the Theory of Painting: To Which Is Added an Index of Mixed Tints, and an Introduction to Painting in Water-Colours, With Precepts In the practical part, a copious set of tints is arranged as an Index, in order to save as much as possible the time usually devoted to the elementary department of colouring: to these the student can refer, as he would to a dictionary for the explanation of a word. The assistance afforded by a few careful in spections of this Index will make the student acquainted with a greater number of mixed colours, than he would probably acquire in a practice of many months. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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