Section

GLOSSARY OF ART TERMS

Edited by Mark Quinlan

  1. A
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  6. F
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  24. X
  25. Y
  26. Z
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Easel

A stand or resting place for working on or displaying a painting. A simple easel can be a tripod with a cross bar for the painting to sit on. Light folding easels were not produced until the 18th and 19th centuries, when painters took to working out of doors.

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Easel Painting

An easel is an apparatus designed to hold the support (e.g., canvas, board, wooden panel) upon which a work is painted. An easel painting is literally a painting created on an easel; it therefore differs from mural painting or other architectural or immovable types of painting. The term ‘easel-painting’ is applied to any picture small [...]

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Ecorche

An écorché is a figure drawn, painted, or sculpted showing the muscles of the body without skin. Renaissance architect and theorist, Leon Battista Alberti recommended that when painters intend to depict a nude, they should first arrange the muscles and bones, then depict the overlying skin.

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Edition

A limited number of impressions (printed sheets) of a print. When an edition is complete, the plate or block is sometimes destroyed by defacement, a process known as cancelling. Since the 19th century, artists have usually noted the edition number on the print itself. This number appears as a fraction, with the top number indicating [...]

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Encaustic

An ancient painting medium in which pigment is suspended in a binder of hot wax or wax resin. Known since at least the first century, when it was used to create the famous mummy portraits at Faiyum in Egypt. Metal tools and special brushes can be used to shape the paint before it cools, or [...]

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En face

In portraiture, a pose in which the sitter faces the viewer directly; full face.

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Engraving

In engraving, lines are cut into a copper plate with a tool called a graver or burin. The lines are neatly incised and then filled with ink that is transferred under high pressure to paper using a printing press. Engraving is an intaglio process.

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En plein air

French for ‘in open air’, used to describe paintings that have been executed outdoors, rather than in the studio. Plein air painting was taken up by the English painters Richard Parks Bonington and John Constable, and the French painters of the Barbizon School. It also became central to the development of Impressionism.

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Equilibrium

In fine art, a word used to describe balance of compositional entities such as shape, spatial qualities, colour and linearity. A work without equilibrium can seem aesthetically unpleasant to some viewers. However, many avant-garde artists deliberately violate rules of “equilibrium” as part of their rebellion against conventional art.

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Etching

Etching is related to engraving, but uses acid (rather than a burin or graver) to incise a metal plate along lines scratched into the plate’s surface. A metal plate is coated with an acid-resistant film, into which the artist draws with an etching needle to create the lines to be printed. When the plate is [...]

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Euston Road School

A British Modern realist group formed in 1938 of artists all of whom either taught or studied at the School of Painting and Drawing at 316 Euston Road in London. They were a conscious reaction to the avant-garde. Instead, they asserted the importance of painting traditional subjects in a realist manner. Some were members of [...]

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Execution

To execute a work of art is to create and produce it.

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Expressionism

In general, a tendency to use the means of painting - colour, space, texture, form - to express the emotions of the artist, rather than to faithfully represent the outer world; an example being the works of Vincent Van Gogh. German Expressionism was a specific style in which distorted form and bold, strident colours were [...]

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Eye-level

The perceived line that runs across a painting, level with the viewer’s eye. This perspective allows the viewer to imagine where the artist was in relation to his or her subject.