© the artist's estate / Bridgeman Images. Image credit: The Women’s Art Collection
A drawing material consisting of a stick of colour made up of ground pigment mixed with just enough gum or resin to bind it together. Pastels originated in the 16th century in Italy, developed from the technique of drawing in coloured chalks. Early pastels were restricted to black, white, and red or flesh-colour and the invention of a fuller range of colours is credited to the landscape painter and etcher Johann Alexander Thiele (1685–1752).
The Venetian artist Rosalba Carriera, famed throughout the courts of Europe for her portraits, introduced pastel to France where, in the course of the 18th century, it enjoyed its heyday. The most individual pastellist of the 18th century, however, was the Swiss painter Jean-Etienne Liotard who travelled widely in Europe and also visited Constantinople. Interest in pastel revived in the later 19th century, especially in the work of Degas and his followers. A major conservation problem with pastel is caused by the weak adhesion of the crumbly drawing material to the paper surface, consequently pastels are relatively fragile and suffer from loss of pigment if subjected to movement. Fixatives can be applied, usually in the form of a spray, to remedy this, but it is now generally accepted that the fixatives themselves can cause harmful effects of discoloration.
Text source: 'The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms' (2nd Edition) by Michael Clarke
