Painting I / Brushes, Tools and the Mark
Practice question · Put in order

Arrange these developments in the painter's toolkit in the order they happened.

Hints
  1. The bladder is the pre-industrial solution and lasted for centuries.
  2. The tube arrives in the 1840s and everything portable follows it.
Show the answer
  1. Ground paint is stored in tied pig's bladders, pierced with a tack to release it
  2. Metal ferrules make the flat brush possible in the early nineteenth century
  3. Colourmen begin selling paint in glass syringes in the 1820s
  4. John Goffe Rand patents the collapsible metal tube in 1841
  5. Screw-capped tubes and the portable box easel take painters outdoors
Why

Renoir said that without paint in tubes there would have been no Impressionism, and the sequence shows why that is not an exaggeration. A bladder cannot be resealed and a syringe barely can; the tube is the first container that lets a painter carry twenty colours into a field and bring nineteen of them home.

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