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Anquetin, an artist of brilliant promise and one of the most enchanting draughtsmen of his time. He was the friend and counsellor of Degas, Lautrec, Renoir and many others, and because of his gifts and his extensive knowledge of drawing and anatomy, he was often referred to as the French Michel- Angelo. But he realized that the painters of his day had some- how lost the key to great painting and, while still young, he gave up his career as an artist, devoting himself instead to the study of the technique of painting. He studied intensively the work of the Great Masters in the museums, not for the Purpose Of imitating them, but in an effort to discover their techniques. Rubens and Titian particularly were his gods. His whole life was an unceasing struggle to learn the under lying truth about painting. Rut, unfortunately, his discover- ies were invalidated from the beginning because in the period in which he undertook them the paintings in the museums all were covered with several layers of varnish which he, like others of his colleagues (Louis-Gustave Ricard among them), took to be glazes. Anquetin examined these paintings with minute care in the attempt to find out how the panels were prepared-- to distinguish which were the first brush strokes, also to diff- entiate those which were superimposed from those which carried the underlying material. Furthermore, he tried to re- construct the succession of the different stages of execution, for he thought that the success of the old masters was due to their method rather than to their materials, and that they used but one vehicle in their oil painting--linseed oil mixed with turpentine. But this conclusion was wrong, as was his belief that the transparency, which is a fundamental principle in the old techniques, was obtained only by painting over a grisaille with transparent glazes. The error of this conclusion will become clear later. So, profiting from the experiences of my predecessors and colleagues, I undertook similar investigations in 1920, the object of my search being the secret material known to the old masters but lost to us. I soon found out that the available means of investigation were very limited. There were plenty of paintings to be seen, but paintings in themselves are not |