History of Gouache painting

Gouache is a most attractive and easy medium to use and it is gaining in greatly in popularity with amateur painters. It is not a new medium to professional artists and designers and, in fact, has quite a long history.

Often referred to as bodycolour it was used by such painters as Dürer, Rubens, Van Dyck and Poussin.

Gouache comes form the Italian word guazzo for mud. It is pronounced "gwash"  It is believed to have been discovered in the 11th century in Italy by a monk who added zinc white to watercolour whilst illustrating manuscripts.

Since then Gouache has remained in the shadows as another member of the water colour family. 

French artist Joseph Goupy (1689-1783) introduced the British to Gouache.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Chinese White was often added to transparent watercolour to make it opaque and Turner used this "gouache" very effectively on tinted paper. In more recent years gouache has been used by among others, Degas, Vuillard, Picasso, Matisse, Sutherland and Ben Shahn.

Not only has gouache been used for fine art painting techniques, it has been developed for today's professional designers and it is called Designer's Gouache. All the colours are intermixable and allow the designer to achieve a fine degree of colour matching which reproduce well.

Here is a list of some famous artists who enjoyed painting with gouache:

• Albrecht Dürer 1471-1528
• Nicholas Hillard 1547-1619
• Peter Paul Rubens 1577-1640
• Sir Anthony Van Dyck 1599-1641
• Nicolas Poussin 1594-1665
• Edgar Degas 1834-1917
• Egon Schiele 1890-1918
• Bidget Riley 1931

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