 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Art materials |
| Founded | 1887 |
| Founder | Gustave Sennelier |
| Headquarters | |
| Products | Acrylic, oil, watercolor, gouache, pastel, india ink, tempera |
| Website | sennelier-colors.com |
Sennelier is a French manufacturing company of art materials, mostly famous for its hand selected pigments. The company produces a wide range of paint products, including acrylic, oil, watercolor, gouache, oil and soft pastel, india ink, tempera, and other media.
Gustave Sennelier opened this art supply store in 1887, near the famous Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Initially, Sennelier sold paints made by various manufacturers; later he chose to produce his own paints using local pigments and binders procured from his travels across Europe.
Anecdotally, it is believed that Sennelier gained prominence at this time. Art-supply shops were ubiquitous, and Cézanne, Gauguin, and many other artists would shop around in the neighborhood, in search of particular shades of paint. If Gustave Sennelier didn't stock the color, he would create it for his painters.
In 1949, Henri Sennelier, Gustave's son, created the first professional-quality oil pastel for Pablo Picasso. Picasso wanted colors he could use on any surface, without any special preparation. [1] In addition to the aforementioned Cézanne, Gauguin, and Picasso, Vincent van Gogh was also known to have used Sennelier oil paint.
Sennelier is one of just a few companies that still provides dry pigments for sale. Most artists today simply buy ready-mixed paints. The range of dry pure pigments offered by the company is quite large, exceeding eighty colors. The artist can then mix the colors into the preferred medium, creating a range of possibilities. Sennnelier has a website that explains more about these techniques, supported by a number of videos demonstrating the use of the products. It is in French, but allows the user to choose an English translation.
Throughout history, forms of art have gone through periodic abrupt changes called artistic revolutions. Movements have come to an end to be replaced by a new movement markedly different in striking ways.
Acrylic paint is a fast-drying paint made of pigment suspended in acrylic polymer emulsion and plasticizers, silicone oils, defoamers, stabilizers, or metal soaps. Most acrylic paints are water-based, but become water-resistant when dry. Depending on how much the paint is diluted with water, or modified with acrylic gels, mediums, or pastes, the finished acrylic painting can resemble a watercolor, a gouache, or an oil painting, or have its own unique characteristics not attainable with other media and are meant for canvases.
Oil painting is a painting method involving the procedure of painting with pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on canvas, wood panel or copper for several centuries, spreading from Europe to the rest of the world. The advantages of oil for painting images include "greater flexibility, richer and denser colour, the use of layers, and a wider range from light to dark". But the process is slower, especially when one layer of paint needs to be allowed to dry before another is applied.
Paint is a liquid pigment that, after applied to a solid material and allowed to dry, adds a film-like layer. As art, this is used to create an image, known as a painting. Paint can be made in many colors and types. Most paints are either oil-based or water-based, and each has distinct characteristics.
A pastel is an art medium that consist of powdered pigment and a binder. It can exist in a variety of forms, including a stick, a square, a pebble, or a pan of color, though other forms are possible. The pigments used in pastels are similar to those used to produce some other colored visual arts media, such as oil paints; the binder is of a neutral hue and low saturation. The color effect of pastels is closer to the natural dry pigments than that of any other process.
Tempera, also known as egg tempera, is a permanent, fast-drying painting medium consisting of pigments mixed with a water-soluble binder medium, usually glutinous material such as egg yolk. Tempera also refers to the paintings done in this medium. Tempera paintings are very long-lasting, and examples from the first century AD still exist. Egg tempera was a primary method of painting until after 1500 when it was superseded by oil painting. A paint consisting of pigment and binder commonly used in the United States as poster paint is also often referred to as "tempera paint", although the binders in this paint are different from traditional tempera paint.
Watercolor or watercolour, also aquarelle, is a painting method in which the paints are made of pigments suspended in a water-based solution. Watercolor refers to both the medium and the resulting artwork. Aquarelles painted with water-soluble colored ink instead of modern water colors are called aquarellum atramento by experts. However, this term has now tended to pass out of use.
Enamel paint is paint that air-dries to a hard, usually glossy, finish, used for coating surfaces that are outdoors or otherwise subject to hard wear or variations in temperature; it should not be confused with decorated objects in "painted enamel", where vitreous enamel is applied with brushes and fired in a kiln. The name is something of a misnomer, as in reality, most commercially available enamel paints are significantly softer than either vitreous enamel or stoved synthetic resins, and are totally different in composition; vitreous enamel is applied as a powder or paste and then fired at high temperature. There is no generally accepted definition or standard for use of the term "enamel paint", and not all enamel-type paints may use it.
Cadmium pigments are a class of pigments that contain cadmium. Most of the cadmium produced worldwide has been for use in rechargeable nickel–cadmium batteries, which have been replaced by other rechargeable nickel-chemistry cell varieties such as NiMH cells, but about half of the remaining consumption of cadmium, which is approximately 2,000 tonnes annually, is used to produce colored cadmium pigments. The principal pigments are a family of yellow, orange and red cadmium sulfides and sulfoselenides, as well as compounds with other metals.
Oil paint is a type of slow-drying paint that consists of particles of pigment suspended in a drying oil, commonly linseed oil. The viscosity of the paint may be modified by the addition of a solvent such as turpentine or white spirit, and varnish may be added to increase the glossiness of the dried oil paint film. The addition of oil or alkyd medium can also be used to modify the viscosity and drying time of oil paint. Oil paints were first used in Asia as early as the 7th century AD and can be seen in examples of Buddhist paintings in Afghanistan. Oil-based paints made their way to Europe by the 12th century and were used for simple decoration, but oil painting did not begin to be adopted as an artistic medium there until the early 15th century. Common modern applications of oil paint are in finishing and protection of wood in buildings and exposed metal structures such as ships and bridges. Its hard-wearing properties and luminous colors make it desirable for both interior and exterior use on wood and metal. Due to its slow-drying properties, it has recently been used in paint-on-glass animation. The thickness of the coat has considerable bearing on the time required for drying: thin coats of oil paint dry relatively quickly.
An oil pastel is a painting and drawing medium formed into a stick which consists of pigment mixed with a binder mixture of non-drying oil and wax. Oil pastel is a type of pastel. They differ from other pastel sticks which are made with a gum or methyl cellulose binder, and from wax crayons which are made without oil. The surface of an oil pastel painting is less powdery than one made from gum pastels, but more difficult to protect with a fixative. Oil pastels are bold and bright. They can be blended easily but they can break easily too.
Liquitex is a US company that supplies art materials, focusing exclusively on the development, manufacture and distribution of acrylic paints. Founded by Henry Levison as "Permanent Pigments" in 1955, the company created the first water-based acrylic gesso. That same year, Levison decided to reorganize the company under the name "Liquitex". In 1956, the company starting selling water-based "Soft Body" acrylic paints. In 1963, "Heavy Body" paints were available with a thicker consistency. The company offers the largest number of acrylic paint products in the world.
Painting is a visual art, which is characterized by the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface. The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and airbrushes, can be used.
Fauvism is a style of painting and an art movement that emerged in France at the beginning of the 20th century. It was the style of les Fauves, a group of modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism. While Fauvism as a style began around 1904 and continued beyond 1910, the movement as such lasted only a few years, 1905–1908, and had three exhibitions. The leaders of the movement were André Derain and Henri Matisse.
Proto-Cubism is an intermediary transition phase in the history of art chronologically extending from 1906 to 1910. Evidence suggests that the production of proto-Cubist paintings resulted from a wide-ranging series of experiments, circumstances, influences and conditions, rather than from one isolated static event, trajectory, artist or discourse. With its roots stemming from at least the late 19th century, this period is characterized by a move towards the radical geometrization of form and a reduction or limitation of the color palette. It is essentially the first experimental and exploratory phase of an art movement that would become altogether more extreme, known from the spring of 1911 as Cubism.
A colored pencil, coloured pencil, map pencil, pencil crayon, or coloured/colouring lead is an art medium constructed of a narrow, pigmented core encased in a wooden cylindrical case. Unlike graphite and charcoal pencils, colored pencils' cores are wax- or oil-based and contain varying proportions of pigments, additives, and binding agents. Water-soluble (watercolor) pencils and pastel pencils are also manufactured as well as colored cores for mechanical pencils.
Watercolor paper is paper or substrate onto which an artist applies watercolor paints, pigments, or dyes. Many types of watercolour papers that are manufactured for the use of watercolors are currently available. Watercolor paper can be made of wood pulp exclusively, or mixed with cotton fibers. Pure cotton watercolor paper is also used by artists, though it typically costs more than pulp-based paper. It is also available as an acid-free medium to help its preservation.
The conservation and restoration of paintings is carried out by professional painting conservators. Paintings cover a wide range of various mediums, materials, and their supports. Painting types include fine art to decorative and functional objects spanning from acrylics, frescoes, and oil paint on various surfaces, egg tempera on panels and canvas, lacquer painting, water color and more. Knowing the materials of any given painting and its support allows for the proper restoration and conservation practices. All components of a painting will react to its environment differently, and impact the artwork as a whole. These material components along with collections care will determine the longevity of a painting. The first steps to conservation and restoration is preventive conservation followed by active restoration with the artist's intent in mind.
Paint mixing is the practice of mixing components or colors of paint to combine them into a working material and achieve a desired hue. The components that go into paint mixing depend on the function of the product sought to be produced. For example, a painter of portraits or scenery on a canvas may be seeking delicate hues and subtle gradiations, while the painter of a house may be more concerned with durability and consistency of colors in paints presented to customers, and the painter of a bridge or a ship may have the weatherability of the paint as their primary concern.
Famille d'acrobates avec singe is a 1905 painting by Pablo Picasso. It depicts a family of travelling circus performers during an intimate moment. The work was produced on cardboard using mixed media: gouache, watercolour, pastel and Indian ink. It is held by the Gothenburg Museum of Art in Gothenburg, Sweden. The work was painted at a key phase in Picasso's life, as he made the transition from an impoverished bohemian at the start of 1905 to a successful artist by the end of 1906.
