Vincent van Gogh worked primarily with oil paints, applying them in thick, sculptural layers with hog bristle brushes on commercially primed canvas. But his toolkit extended well beyond paint and brush. Over the course of his career, he used reed pens, iron gall ink, graphite, chalk, watercolors, and a rotating cast of pigments, many of which he bought from small Parisian shops at bargain prices. The specific materials he chose shaped the texture, color, and even the long-term fate of his paintings.
Oil Paints and Pigments
Van Gogh painted almost exclusively in oils during the most productive years of his career. By the 1880s, oil paints were widely available in pre-mixed tubes, and Van Gogh took full advantage of this convenience. He built up an extensive palette that included lead white, zinc white, chrome yellow, cadmium yellow, vermilion, emerald green, cobalt blue, ultramarine, and Prussian blue, among others. He was especially drawn to chrome yellow, which gave him the intense, saturated golds seen in works like the Sunflowers series.
His approach to color was bold and deliberate. He often applied paint straight from the tube or mixed minimally on the palette, preserving the vibrancy of individual pigments. He layered contrasting colors side by side rather than blending them on the canvas, a technique influenced by the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists he encountered in Paris. This meant the chemical properties of each pigment mattered enormously, because the paints sat exposed on the surface rather than buried under glazes.
Not all of his pigments have aged well. The chrome yellows he favored came in two chemical varieties: a stable form and a sulfur-rich form prone to darkening when exposed to light. Research on the Amsterdam version of Sunflowers confirmed that the sulfur-rich variety undergoes a chemical reaction where chromium atoms change from one oxidation state to another, producing brownish compounds at the paint surface. This means some of the bright yellows Van Gogh intended have shifted toward olive and brown tones over time. The degradation products concentrate at the interface between the paint layer and the varnish, which is why conservators now carefully control lighting conditions for his most vulnerable works.
Where He Bought His Supplies
In Paris, Van Gogh’s main source for painting materials was the shop of Julien Tanguy, known affectionately as Père Tanguy. Tanguy was a paint grinder and art supplier who was famously sympathetic to struggling artists, often accepting paintings in exchange for supplies. His canvases and paints had a reputation for being cheap and sometimes questionable in quality, which may have contributed to some of the conservation challenges Van Gogh’s work presents today.
Van Gogh didn’t rely on Tanguy exclusively, though. He also purchased materials from Tasset et L’Hôte, a more established supplier, and visited several other shops around Montmartre. After moving to Arles in 1888, he had materials shipped from Paris and also sourced supplies locally when he could. His letters to his brother Theo are filled with specific requests for tubes of paint, noting exact colors and quantities, revealing how carefully he tracked his materials even when money was tight.
Canvas and Ground Layers
Van Gogh rarely prepared his own canvases. He typically bought pre-primed, commercially stretched canvas, particularly from Tasset et L’Hôte during his time in Arles and Saint-Rémy (1888 to 1890). These canvases came with factory-applied ground layers, the white coating that seals the fabric and provides a smooth surface for painting.
Scientific analysis of these commercially primed canvases has revealed at least six distinct ground formulations. The most common type was based on lead white mixed with varying amounts of calcium carbonate (essentially chalk) and barium sulfate. Some grounds contained lithopone, a white pigment made by combining barium sulfate and zinc sulfide. The proportions varied considerably. In double-layered grounds, the bottom layer might contain roughly 60% lead and 20% calcium by weight, while the top layer was richer in lead white for a brighter, more opaque surface. Other canvases used a simpler single layer of lead white with a small amount of chalk filler.
These ground layers weren’t just a blank surface. Their absorbency, texture, and color influenced how Van Gogh’s paint behaved. A more absorbent chalk-heavy ground would soak up oil from the paint, leaving a matte, slightly chalky finish. A dense lead white ground would let the paint sit on top with more gloss and body. Van Gogh sometimes left areas of the ground exposed in his finished paintings, particularly along edges and between brushstrokes, making the ground an active part of the composition.
Brushes and Application Tools
Van Gogh’s thick, directional brushwork is one of the most recognizable features of his painting. He achieved this using stiff hog bristle brushes, primarily flat-shaped. Hog bristle, specifically from Chungking hogs, has a natural stiffness and split ends (called “flags”) that hold a large amount of paint and deposit it in textured, ridged strokes. Flat brushes gave him the ability to create sharp edges and bold, parallel lines of color.
He also used round brushes for finer details and, in some works, applied paint directly with a palette knife to create smooth, thick slabs of color. In his most heavily textured paintings, the impasto (raised paint) is sometimes a centimeter thick or more, built up in rapid, confident strokes that follow the contours of the subject. Trees swirl, skies ripple, and fields pulse because each brushstroke is a visible, physical mark rather than a blended transition.
Van Gogh occasionally squeezed paint directly from the tube onto the canvas, skipping the brush entirely. His letters describe working at extraordinary speed, sometimes completing a painting in a single session, which demanded tools that could move large quantities of paint quickly.
Drawing Materials
Before and alongside his painting career, Van Gogh was a prolific draftsman. His early works relied heavily on pencil, black chalk, and charcoal, often on inexpensive paper. He used carpenter’s pencils for broad, dark marks and experimented with combinations of media, layering chalk over pencil or adding washes of watercolor to ink drawings.
During his time in Arles, he developed a distinctive drawing style using reed pens. He cut the pens himself from local reeds, shaping the tips to produce thick, emphatic lines that echoed the bold strokes of his paintings. He paired these reed pens with iron gall ink, a traditional ink made from tannic acid and iron salts. When fresh, iron gall ink is a deep blue-black, but it oxidizes over time and turns warm brown. This aging process has significantly changed the appearance of Van Gogh’s Arles drawings. Works like “Avenue of Pollard Birches and Poplars,” now at the Art Institute of Chicago, show how the once-black pen lines have bled into the paper, merging areas of close hatching and softening the contrast Van Gogh originally intended. The ink has also imparted a golden tone to the paper itself.
Van Gogh used these reed pen drawings not as preliminary sketches but as finished works in their own right, often creating drawn versions of paintings he had just completed to send to Theo or to other artists. The reed pen’s chunky, slightly unpredictable line suited his desire for bold, expressive marks over precise rendering.
Watercolors and Other Media
Van Gogh used watercolors extensively during his early years in the Netherlands and continued using them periodically throughout his career. He often combined watercolor with other media: pencil underdrawing, pen outlines, or opaque white highlights. His watercolor technique was generally direct and washy rather than highly controlled, using broad strokes of diluted color to establish tone and atmosphere.
He also experimented with oil paint thinned with turpentine to create washes on unprimed canvas and cardboard, especially when money was short and he couldn’t afford to work in full impasto. Some of his paintings on cardboard have a matte, almost pastel-like quality because the absorbent surface pulled the oil binder out of the paint. These works are among the most fragile in his catalog, as the paint layer bonds poorly to the untreated surface.