Misplaced Pages

Licked finish

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
Find sources: "Licked finish" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (June 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
A Girl Defending Herself Against Eros, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, reflects the licked finish style; the brushstrokes are as invisible as possible, so as to make the painting appear more lifelike and minimize emphasis on the work's origin of painting and brushwork.

A licked finish is a hallmark of French academic art. It refers to the process of smoothing the surface quality of a painting so that the presence of the artist's hand is no longer visible. It was codified by the French Academy in the eighteenth century in order to distinguish 'professional' art from that produced by amateurs.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres summed up the academic technique: "The brushstroke, as accomplished as it may be, should not be visible: otherwise, it prevents the illusion, immobilizes everything. Instead of the object represented, it calls attention to the process: instead of the thought, it betrays the hand."

The rejection of the licked finish in favour of visible brushstrokes is one of the hallmarks of Impressionism.

References

  1. Mirzoeff, Nicholas (2006). Bodyscape: Art, Modernity and the Ideal Figure. Routledge. p. 97. ISBN 1134859783.


Stub icon

This article related to art techniques is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it.

Categories: