Learning the glazing technique from Bouguereau, new series of videos

I’m embarking on another short series of videos on my youtube channel showing the process of copying this part of a Bouguereau painting from start to finish. I hope to use this as a way to learn about his process and to improve my own glazing technique. Bouguereau used glazing and also glazed over grisaille underpainting as a technique of painting and his glazing has a beautiful translucent quality. This first video focusses on how I prepare a canvas or board and using a grid to transfer a photo or drawing to the surface. This is how I work for all of my commissioned portraits.

This is what the demonstration looks like after working. These images show the grisaille stage of my copy and then then first glaze. The first glaze is filmed in real time on youtube. This took around an hour, but that was for the purposes of the demonstration. I may take longer to do a single glaze although its questionable whether that would make great TV.

What the video highlights is the dramatic, magical quality of the glazing technique and how it can quickly breathe life into a monochrome painting. Bouguereau often also just glazed over colour and that is how many artists work, myself included sometimes. I just love the magic of glazing colour and the drama is heightened when done over black and white. I’m using Ivory Black and Titanium White. Flake White, made using Lead Oxide, is arguably more juicy and less opaque than Titanium White but I’ve stopped using it because I don’t like the idea of everything in the studio getting covered in traces of Lead. Titanium White just needs to be handled with care so as to avoid it flattening and bleaching everything out.

From grisaille to the first glaze. After Bouguereau

From 1st glaze to the second glaze. Deepening the colours after a tentative start

There’s more drama in the second stage where the colours are deepened. Perhaps I could have got closer to this in the first glaze, I just have to respect the opacity of Titanium White and the intensity of the colours. I begin by feeling my way through the chroma and having laid down markers at this stage I can then proceed more confidently in the later stages. The worst thing is going too fast too soon and then having to backtrack. This is almost always where I fudge it. Or at least I could do without the extra stress of having to make amends. After these educated guesses and tentative steps I’ll then continue to refine the chroma in the third, fourth and fifth glazes and then leave it, usually. This is also closer perhaps to Bouguereau’s general working method as far as I can see; colour glazes over colour.

One bit of magic I loved was glazing her hair band. Its just a loose stroke of thin orangey paint, as I remember. One stroke and it’s done. I deepened it later with another glaze but that’s it. It’s the sparkle, the gorgeous, breathtaking simplicity and effortlessness as the pigments sing over the underpainting that gets me going. Perhaps the metaphor of a musical chord is right. Here it’s just a layer of juicy paint. Nothing at all. A smear on the pallet suddenly becomes a shining jewel. This is something to celebrate and cherish. What a joy painting can be. In Middlemarch Eliot said that colour penetrates our souls in the same way scent does, and here we are looking at pure light.

I’ll try and add a clip here:

If you’d like a portrait built up this way — grisaille, then successive glazes, get in touch about a commission.

Here is the original, cropped from the full nude painting. This particular photo doesn’t have the high chroma from the version I painted. Maybe I should have copied more of it as it’s a nice painting. I don’t know if the crop visually makes sense however I think it works for the demonstration though.

William Bouguereau- Après le Bain

I would have been laughed at by my old art school mates for even showing an interest in Bouguereau. I probably still am! I can find some of his paintings and their sentimentality irritating, and the first book I read at art was Ways of Seeing by John Berger where Berger lays into Bouguereau as the prime example of silliness in 19th century Academic painting. Berger is right about Bouguereau taking nudity to silly extremes sometimes, but then Apres le Bain has its own painterly merits. It is everything Berger said, and yet I still like it for its beautiful translucent glazing effects, here depicting a beautiful naked or ‘nude’ young woman. I love the way he treats shadow tones on the skin with glazes, as I do a lot of Bouguereau’s other paintings. I don’t know if it’s possible that I can look beyond the subject to the technique. It was the only painting he made that had a portrait I felt I could use for this demonstration.

Here is a link to the first video in the series: