Paint Type

Oil Paint

Oil paint is a slow-drying art medium made with pigment and drying oil, allowing extended work time, smooth blending, and layered application on supports.

Oil paint surface compatibility

Oil paint performs well on many stable supports, while absorbent surfaces usually need a suitable ground to control oil penetration and adhesion.

Surface	Compatibility	Preparation	Ground	Finish	Guide
Canvas	Excellent	Use oil-ready pre-primed canvas or size raw canvas before applying a suitable ground.	Artist acrylic gesso or oil ground	Optional final varnish	—
Linen	Excellent	Use oil-ready pre-primed linen or size raw linen before applying a suitable ground.	Artist acrylic gesso or oil ground	Optional final varnish	—
Wood	Excellent with preparation	Use a clean, dry, stable panel; sealing first can reduce absorbency and moisture movement.	Artist acrylic gesso or oil ground	Optional final varnish	—
Plywood	Good with preparation	Use untreated, clean, dry, stable plywood and prepare the surface before painting.	Suitable oil painting primer or ground	Optional final varnish	—
Paper	Good with preparation	Use sturdy watercolor, mixed-media, or suitable printmaking paper and seal the painting side first.	PVA size followed by a suitable ground	Optional final varnish	—
Prepared painting board	Good	Confirm the board is rigid, clean, dry, and intended for oil painting.	Use the existing oil-ready ground or apply a suitable primer	Optional final varnish	—
Plexiglass	Good with a compatible formula	Clean with acrylic-safe products and test the paint first, especially when thinners or other solvents are involved.	Product-specific; avoid grounds, primers, or thinners that can attack acrylic sheet.	Allow the paint to cure fully and keep incompatible solvents away from the finished sheet.	—
Polycarbonate	Formula-specific	Use plastic-safe cleaning methods and test the exact oil paint, medium, thinner, and cleaning system before use; some solvents can craze or stress-crack polycarbonate.	Product-specific; use only grounds or primers known to be compatible with polycarbonate.	Allow the paint to cure fully and keep incompatible solvents away from the finished sheet.	—
Metal	Preparation required	Clean and degrease thoroughly, then prepare the surface for adhesion.	Manufacturer-approved oil painting primer	Optional final varnish	—

Sources: Gamblin Ground, Gamblin Sizes and Grounds, Winsor & Newton Oil Painting Primer, PLEXIGLAS painting guidance, SABIC LEXAN sheet guidance, and Korean Art Museum Association: Bong-Chae Son, All Things Pass I.

Painters who used oil paint

Bob Ross demonstrated oil landscapes on canvas for television, while Vincent van Gogh used conspicuous strokes and vivid contrasts in his oil paintings.

Bob Ross

The Smithsonian records Blue Ridge Falls and On a Clear Day as oil paintings made for The Joy of Painting. Both works are oil on canvas, documenting the medium in Ross’s televised landscape demonstrations. The object records also list wood among the materials, but name canvas as the painting support.
Vincent van Gogh

Van Gogh painted Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat (1887) in oil on canvas, using conspicuous strokes and vivid, contrasting colors. He later made The Starry Night (1889), also oil on canvas, with sweeping rhythmic marks. He also brushed oil over black chalk on pink paper for Corridor in the Asylum.
Claude Monet

Monet painted La Grenouillère (1869) in oil on canvas, using short visible strokes to record shifting light on the Seine. For The Four Trees (1891), he worked from a boat and alternated among canvases as the light changed, continuing the serial study in Rouen Cathedral.
Winslow Homer

For The Gulf Stream, Winslow Homer used oil on canvas to construct a substantial, closely observed seascape. He revised the painting over several years, building the storm, waves, and stranded figure into a carefully balanced composition; the museum record identifies its canvas support.
Paul Klee

MoMA records Fire in the Evening (1929) as oil on cardboard, with horizontal color bands and a vivid red upright shape reflecting Klee’s Egyptian journey. In Around the Fish (1926), he combined oil and tempera on canvas later mounted on cardboard.
Yayoi Kusama

MoMA documents oil on canvas in Kusama’s No. F (1959), where densely interlaced Infinity Net marks build into a field of repeated brushwork. The painted canvas differs from her later spray-painted patterns on paperboard and other supports.
Jackson Pollock

Oil appears alongside enamel in Pollock’s Number 1A, 1948 and Lavender Mist. LACMA also records No. 15, 1950 as oil on Masonite, showing that his poured and flung marks were not confined to large stretched canvases or one paint.
Henri Matisse

For Landscape at Collioure (1905), Matisse brushed oil onto unprimed canvas, sometimes applying it straight from the tube and leaving woven fabric visible between strokes. His later Landscape (1918) uses oil on canvas board, a different support.
Georgia O’Keeffe

Whitney catalogs Abstraction (1926) as oil on canvas, while The Met records Grey Line with Lavender and Yellow in oil. O’Keeffe added oil to her practice in 1918, using it for both abstract compositions and enlarged flowers, distinct from her watercolor works on paper.
J. M. W. Turner

Turner used oil for harbor, landscape, and historical paintings. The National Gallery of Art records Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight as oil on canvas; its glowing lights and smoky atmosphere form a dramatic nocturnal scene, separate from his extensive watercolor practice.
Helen Frankenthaler

Frankenthaler diluted oil with turpentine in early soak-stain paintings so color penetrated raw canvas. Break-Through (1956), by contrast, is oil on sized, primed linen, while Red and Brown Scene (1961) uses canvas board. These examples show her varied supports and handling.
Joan Miró

Miró combined oil with tempera in Painting (1927), then mixed oil and casein in Painting (Birds, Personages, and Blue Star) (1950). The first is on canvas and the latter on raw, unprimed canvas, documenting changes in binders and supports within his experimental practice.
Edgar Degas

Degas’s The Races (1871–72) is oil on wood, with jockeys and horses arranged across a wide landscape. In The Dance Class (1874), oil on canvas organizes dancers and their teacher inside a rehearsal room, distinct from the pastels for which he is also known.
Marc Chagall

MoMA catalogs Chagall’s I and the Village (1911) as oil on canvas. Interlocking planes and remembered village imagery overlap, joining scenes from his life in Vitebsk with Parisian modernism. The large-scale work anchors oil as a principal medium in many of his finished paintings.
Frida Kahlo

MoMA records Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940) as oil on canvas. Kahlo used the medium for direct self-portraits addressing identity, clothing, and personal history; the collection entry supports oil and canvas in this work, distinct from tempera and watercolor in other pieces.
Edward Hopper

The Whitney records Early Sunday Morning and New York Interior as oil paintings. The medium supports Hopper’s ordered views of streets and domestic spaces, where geometry and quiet light shape the scene, alongside his early watercolor and gouache works on paper.
Jasper Johns

Oil is documented alongside encaustic in Johns’s Flag (1954–55). He used it on a very different object for Painted Bronze (1960), applying oil color to cast-bronze beer cans; the bronze is the support, complicating the boundary between ordinary object and sculpture.
Wassily Kandinsky

Picture with an Archer (1909) is oil on canvas, filling a partly recognizable landscape with intense color. Church at Murnau instead uses oil on board, while White – Soft and Hard combines oil and gouache on canvas, showing varied media and supports.
Pablo Picasso

Picasso’s Carafe and Candlestick (1909) is oil on canvas, though its translucent strokes can resemble gouache. In Student with a Pipe (1913–14), he combined oil with gouache, pasted paper, gesso, sand, and charcoal on canvas, extending Cubism into mixed-media construction.
Roy Lichtenstein

MoMA records Drowning Girl (1963) as oil and acrylic on canvas. Lichtenstein translated a cropped comic image into crisp contours and Ben-Day dots, using hand-painted marks to evoke printed reproduction while keeping the canvas surface visible; oil is one named medium in the record.
Devon Rodriguez

Rodriguez’s portrait paintings use oil on canvas, allowing layered tones across faces, clothing, and surrounding space. His official gallery documents completed portraits and works in progress, showing oil as the central medium in his portrait practice, distinct from shorter watercolor studies.
Sophie Tea

Sophie Tea’s catalog identifies original oil paintings on canvas as a separate body of work from her acrylic pieces. Oil supports layered color and surface detail in larger compositions, while the medium records should not be conflated with her acrylic drawings and paintings on paper.
Abraham Joel Tobias

Tobias’s Sky Formation (1935) is oil on canvas mounted to plywood. The Smithsonian record distinguishes paint from canvas and plywood backing, clarifying the layered construction rather than treating the whole assembly as one support; it documents oil in his early modernist practice.
Billy Al Bengston

LACMA records Bengston’s Humphrey as oil, Liquitex, enamel, and lacquer on Masonite, while the Whitney identifies oil in Kirk. These works place oil among several distinct materials on his painted panels, whose surfaces combine industrial finishes with deliberate color and sheen.
Cy Twombly

Twombly used oil in Leda and the Swan (1962), combining it with pencil and crayon on canvas. He also applied oil-based house paint in Academy and his 1970 Untitled. Those commercial coatings differ from artists’ tube oils, while pencil, pastel, and crayon remain drawing materials.
Édouard Vuillard

Vuillard painted Still Life with Top Hat (1893) in oil on cardboard mounted on panel and The Green Lamp in oil on board. The small domestic scenes use the medium on rigid supports, distinct from the glue-bound distemper he used for large decorative screens.
Jacqueline Humphries

Museum records document oil on board in Humphries’s Hor. #4 1/2 and oil on linen in an untitled 2009 painting. Across these supports, she builds layered fields of dark, fluorescent, and reflective marks. The examples show her material range without reducing the abstract work to one format.
James Gurney

Gurney paints portrait studies in oil, including documented sessions from life. The medium gives him time for sustained modeling, unlike his quicker outdoor casein or watercolor notes. His portrait practice offers a direct study of observed faces alongside the imagined environments and reference models in his illustration work.
Jean Dubuffet

Dubuffet used oil in works such as Apartment Houses, Paris, combining it with sand and charcoal on canvas. He built rough, textured surfaces that challenged polished academic finish, incorporating gritty materials into the painted ground. These constructions distinguish his oil paintings from works made with other binders and coatings.
Reginald Marsh

The Smithsonian catalogs George Tilyou’s Steeplechase as oil and egg tempera on linen mounted on fiberboard. The two binders share a layered support in Marsh’s amusement-park scene. The museum record confirms oil directly, rather than relying on appearance to identify the paint.
Tom Holland

Holland’s early painting practice included oil on canvas, documented for Luv (1963). This work belongs to his early painting phase and uses a flexible support, distinct from the epoxy-coated aluminum sculptures he made in the 1970s. Oil is one material in a broader practice that also includes sculpture.
Yuval Gur

In Tfila, Gur layers oil paint over conductive marks, combining a traditional pictorial medium with electrically active paint beneath. The materials have separate roles: oil forms the visible image while conductive paint enables the interactive operation. Project documentation describes how they work together.
Bong-Chae Son

The Korean Art Museum Association documents oil in Son’s mixed-media paintings, including All Things Pass I. Oil is part of a layered construction rather than the only material. This practice sits alongside his sculptural arrangements of translucent polycarbonate sheets.
Gustav Klimt

The Belvedere records The Kiss as oil colors on prepared canvas. Klimt layered painted passages with gold, silver, platinum, and other metallic elements, contrasting the embracing figures with a patterned ground. The museum distinguishes the oil paint from the applied metals.
Alphonse Mucha

The Met records Mucha’s Maude Adams as Joan of Arc as oil on canvas, a full-length portrait connected to the actress’s stage role. This painted commission differs from his celebrated decorative posters, which were produced as lithographs; the collection record documents oil in his portrait practice.
Agnes Martin

In Little Sister (1962), Martin combined oil and ink with brass nails on a small canvas mounted over wood. Irregular marks interrupt a loose grid, unlike the delicate bands of her later acrylic paintings. The Guggenheim identifies ink and nails separately from the oil paint.
Koloman Moser

The Leopold Museum catalogs Leysin (Le Chamossaire), Mountain Ranges, and Lovers as oil on canvas. In the alpine landscapes, Moser reduces mountain forms to clear contours and color areas; the later figurative work uses a monumental arrangement. These records document oil across varied subjects.
Jan Toorop

Toorop used oil on canvas for landscapes such as The Sea, where small touches of color create a divided, pointillist surface. Short strokes keep the coastal scene active while allowing the composition to read from a distance. The painting documents his oil practice alongside watercolors on paper.
Aleksandr Rodchenko

Rodchenko combined oil and bitumen on canvas in Non-Objective Painting no. 80 (Black on Black) (1918), setting curved black forms against a dark field through differences in texture and sheen. In 1921, he made three unmodulated red, yellow, and blue oil canvases, then turned toward design and photography.
Liubov Popova

In Painterly Architectonic, Popova layered tilted color planes to create shallow, relief-like space. The 1918 version in the Thyssen collection is documented as oil on linen burlap, while MoMA’s 1917 painting is on canvas. The burlap ground contributes texture to the geometric composition.
El Lissitzky

Proun 19D (1920 or 1921) combines oil paint with gesso, varnish, and paper collage on plywood. Lissitzky arranged circles, diagonals, and angled planes to suggest architectural volumes in space. MoMA distinguishes the oil from the varnish, collage, and applied metal foil.
Varvara Stepanova

In Billiard Players (1920), Stepanova built figures from angular blocks and overlapping curves, arranging the players as bodies in motion. The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum notes dotted and crosshatched marks that give the surface a graphic quality. Her related oil painting Figure also assembles a single body from geometric shapes.
Jo Baer

Baer used oil in both early abstract paintings and later figurative works. MoMA records Double-Bar, Grey (Green Line) as oil, with narrow colored bars and dark borders producing precise edge relationships. A later painting shifts to figures and narrative, placing the medium across two distinct phases.
Robert Ryman

MoMA records Ryman’s To Kirk Varnedoe as oil on linen, where brushstrokes, spacing, and exposed ground shape the painting’s appearance. The work shows his attention to how a particular white paint meets a textile support, rather than using white as a neutral fill.
Anselm Kiefer

SFMOMA records oil among the materials in Kiefer’s Sulamith, alongside acrylic, emulsion, shellac, woodcut, and straw on linen. Oil forms one part of a layered mixed-media surface. The museum record helps distinguish that paint from the work’s other materials.
Julian Schnabel

The Met lists oil paint in Schnabel’s Bones and Trumpets Rubbing Against Each Other Towards Infinity (1981). Broken ceramics, wax, plaster, and polyester filler are separate components, not additional paints. Schnabel’s oil sits within a deliberately constructed, relief-like surface that challenges the flat picture plane.
Francesco Clemente

MoMA records oil on canvas in Clemente’s Perseverance (1981), documenting the medium in an early painting. Other collection records identify oil in later canvases and mixed-media installations. These works distinguish oil from the tempera, gouache, and watercolor he used on linen and paper.
Barnett Newman

For Onement I (1948), Newman spread orange oil paint over a taped crimson canvas, leaving a narrow vertical “zip.” His large Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950–51), also oil on canvas, sets slim vertical bands within an expansive red field, making color and scale central to the experience.
Mark Rothko

Rothko’s No. 10 (1950) is oil on canvas. Broad areas of yellow, blue, white, and gray meet in softened boundaries that seem to shift as viewers approach the large work. Its thin, overlapping passages helped establish the color-field compositions for which he is known.
Diego Rivera

Rivera combined oil paint with tempera in The Flower Carrier (1935), applying both to Masonite rather than a wall. The Norton Simon record identifies the mixed medium and rigid support. The easel painting documents a distinct part of Rivera’s practice alongside his better-known murals.
José Clemente Orozco

Orozco’s The Subway (1928) is an oil painting on canvas, compressing commuters into a close urban interior. This portable easel work documents his use of oil apart from monumental frescoes. Museum records also identify oil in his mural studies and other paintings.
Kazimir Malevich

Malevich used oil in early Cubist and later Suprematist paintings. MoMA identifies Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying and Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack (both 1915) as oil on canvas. In White on White (1918), subtle brushwork separates a tilted square from its ground.
Frank Stella

Them Apples (1958) uses oil and nails on cardboard and wood, predating Stella’s systematic stripe paintings. MoMA also identifies oil in the large relief Giufà, la luna, i ladri e le guardie (1984), where it appears alongside synthetic polymer paint and industrial coatings on canvas and metal.
Georges Seurat

Seurat made oil studies while planning A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. An 1884 study is oil on wood; a larger one uses oil on canvas and hatched strokes. In the finished painting, those marks become regular dabs, a method called Divisionism or Pointillism rather than a separate paint type.
Pierre Bonnard

Bonnard’s The Dining Room, Vernonnet is oil on canvas. He used a domestic interior and its figures as a framework for shifting color blocks and patterns, arranging furniture, tableware, and people in a flattened decorative composition instead of a strict perspective view.
Gustave Moreau

Moreau’s Salome with the Head of John the Baptist is oil on wood. He used the firm panel support for a densely detailed, jewel-like mythological image. The Met’s catalog records both medium and support, distinguishing this painting from his watercolors and gouaches on paper.
Willem de Kooning

In Woman I (1950–52), de Kooning repeatedly scraped away and repainted oil and metallic paint on canvas over nearly two years. Thin and thick strokes, contrasting colors, and visible revisions build a figure emerging from abstraction. MoMA’s account documents sustained reworking rather than a single spontaneous pass.
Fernand Léger

In The Village (1914), Léger used oil on canvas to organize rooftops, trees, and a church into cones, cylinders, and geometric planes. The Builders (1920), also oil on canvas, renders workers as interlocking machine-like parts against industrial structures, extending that structured approach to modern labor.
Agnolo Bronzino

The Met catalogs Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man as oil on wood; the Uffizi records Eleonora di Toledo with her son Giovanni in the same medium and support. These court portraits use carefully controlled faces, textiles, and accessories to create a composed, formal presence.
Albert Bierstadt

Bierstadt used oil for western landscapes and smaller studies. The Smithsonian records Among the Sierra Nevada, California as an oil painting on canvas, while Sunrise in the Sierras is an oil study on paper mounted to paperboard. The examples show oil across different scales and supports.
Albert Pinkham Ryder

Ryder’s oil paintings use canvas, wood, and unusual supports. The Met records The Toilers of the Sea on wood and The Bridge on gilt leather. These small, layered scenes vary in support and finish; the gilt leather is the ground in The Bridge, not a separate metallic paint.
Albrecht Dürer

The Met records Dürer’s Virgin and Child as oil on spruce, documenting his use of oil on a rigid wooden panel. That support differs from the paper and parchment used for his studies. The entry identifies this work’s materials without implying the same format for every piece.
Alessandro Allori

The Uffizi catalogs Allori’s Hercules Crowned by the Muses as oil on copper, a small mythological painting made for Francesco I de’ Medici. Allori also painted oil portraits on wood, so the copper work documents a distinct support within his practice rather than a general format.
Amy Sillman

MoMA catalogs oil on canvas in Sillman’s Split 2 and Psychology Today. Across these paintings, she revises layered forms and color rather than treating the canvas as a fixed design from the outset. The collection records document oil within a practice that also includes acrylic and works on paper.
André Derain

Derain’s Fishing Boats, Collioure (1905) and Regent Street, London (1906) are oil on canvas. Their intense color and assertive brushwork document his early Fauvist painting, while the later oil portrait The Black Feather Boa (1935) has a more subdued palette.
Andrew Wyeth

Brandywine’s Wyeth collection records early oil paintings on canvas by Wyeth, including works from his 1930s seascape group. These examples document oil in an earlier phase of his career, alongside watercolor and tempera in later records. The collection specifies the oil-on-canvas combination for the paintings.
Angelica Kauffmann

The Met records Telemachus and the Nymphs of Calypso and The Sorrow of Telemachus as oil on canvas. These large classical narratives document Kauffmann’s use of oil for finished history paintings, distinct from watercolor designs and gouache-prepared drawing sheets also found in her practice.
Anthony van Dyck

The National Gallery catalogs Equestrian Portrait of Charles I (c. 1637–38) as oil on canvas and Charity as oil on wood. These works show Van Dyck using oil for both a court portrait and an allegorical composition, with different supports and carefully rendered figures.
Antoine Watteau

The Met catalogs Mezzetin and The French Comedians as oil paintings on canvas. Watteau staged performers and figures in atmospheric landscapes for theatrical and fête galante subjects. His red-and-black chalk figure studies are drawings, separate from these oil paintings.
Artemisia Gentileschi

The National Gallery identifies Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria (c. 1615–17) as oil on canvas; the Met catalogs Esther before Ahasuerus in the same medium. These records document oil in both a direct self-image and a large biblical narrative, across distinct subjects.
Arthur Hughes

Tate records Hughes’s April Love as oil on canvas. He places a courting couple in a carefully rendered garden, where fallen blossoms and the enclosed setting reinforce the scene’s emotional tension. Other museum records identify oil in his narrative paintings, including literary subjects.
Asher B. Durand

Durand painted Kindred Spirits and The Beeches in oil on canvas. In these landscapes, he combines close observation of trees and terrain with carefully ordered compositions. Museum records document the same medium across wooded and open settings, making oil his principal documented paint type.
Audrey Flack

The Met catalogs Flack’s Macarena of Miracles in oil on canvas, while Leonardo’s Lady places oil over an acrylic layer. These records document oil in both a dense photorealist still life and a layered portrait. The second work shows the paints as sequential components, not interchangeable labels.
Bart van der Leck

Van der Leck’s Woodhackers (1927) is oil on canvas. He simplifies workers and tools into broad, sharply separated shapes while retaining enough detail to identify the labor scene. This mature composition differs from the gouache studies on tracing paper he made a decade earlier.
Bartholomeus Spranger

The Met catalogs Spranger’s Jupiter and Antiope (1596) as oil on canvas. Its intertwined mythological figures and elongated poses exemplify the courtly Mannerist painting he developed in Prague. Museum records document oil in his finished compositions, distinguishing them from his drawings and prints.
Ben Shahn

The Whitney identifies both tempera and oil in Shahn’s Everyman, documenting oil in a mixed-media painting. Other records identify oil on canvas in his work, while this entry shows oil used alongside tempera. It remains distinct from his watercolor, gouache, and tempera works on paper or board.
Bernard Perlin

The Smithsonian identifies The Bar (1957) as oil on canvas. This documents a distinct medium and support in Perlin’s figurative scenes, separate from the casein on fiberboard in The Farewell and gouache on board in The Lovers. The collection records preserve those material differences.
Bridget Riley

In Blue About (1983/2002), Riley used oil on linen to set narrow vertical bands of color beside one another. Their changing relationships create sensations of shimmer and instability. MoMA’s medium record identifies oil, rather than emulsion, for this particular painting.
Caravaggio

The National Gallery records The Supper at Emmaus (1601) as oil on canvas. Caravaggio used close observation and concentrated light against a dark setting to give the life-size figures and still-life objects a forceful presence. Other collection records document oil in works such as The Denial of Saint Peter.
Carlo Carrà

Carrà’s Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1910–11) is oil on canvas, with banners and charging figures arranged around a street struggle. In Still Life with Triangle and The Metaphysical Muse (both 1917), he used oil for quieter, tightly ordered arrangements as his imagery shifted toward stillness.
Caspar David Friedrich

Friedrich’s Northern Landscape, Spring is oil on canvas; collection records also document Winter Landscape in oil. He used the medium for carefully composed scenes where a small human presence sits within expansive terrain. These works establish oil as a medium for his finished landscapes.
Charles Demuth

Demuth used oil in My Egypt (1927), combining it with graphite and fabricated chalk on composition board to render Lancaster’s grain elevators as sharply defined architecture. The work belongs to his Precisionist treatment of industry, where hard-edged forms replace atmospheric landscape. The record identifies oil alongside the other materials.
Charles-François Daubigny

Daubigny’s The Hamlet of Optevoz is oil on canvas, while The Banks of the Oise is oil on wood. The Met also records View at Auvers-sur-Oise as oil on paper laid down on canvas. These examples document the medium across several supports.
Charles Sheeler

Sheeler translated observations of the Ford River Rouge plant into crisp oil compositions. The Met records oil on canvas in works including Americana and Water. Their hard-edged architecture differs from his gouache studies on paper, documenting oil in his carefully structured views of modern industry.
Charles Warren Eaton

Eaton’s Woods in Winter is oil on canvas. He uses a restrained range of dark tree forms and pale ground to shape the winter landscape, while other museum records document oil in his twilight scenes. The paintings show his attention to trees and seasonal light in Tonalist landscapes.
Christian Schad

Maria and Annunziata “From the Harbour” (1923) is oil on canvas, with two figures carefully modeled under theatrical light. Portrait of Dr. Haustein (1928), also oil on canvas, contrasts the doctor with a mysterious shadow. Schad’s self-portrait uses oil on wood; his Schadographs were photographs.
Chuck Close

The Met catalogs Close’s John II (2011) as oil on canvas, documenting his later return to oil for a large portrait. This differs from the acrylic and ink used in Robert/104,072. The records show how he applied distinct paints to portraiture across different periods.
Cornelis van Haarlem

The Mauritshuis catalogs The Massacre of the Innocents as oil on canvas, while the National Galleries of Scotland records Nude Figure Studies as oil on paper. These examples document oil across a large history painting and studies on a flexible sheet, without assuming a single support.
Craig Kauffman

Kauffman’s early Untitled (1960) is oil on board and linen, according to the SFMOMA collection record. This painting documents his use of traditional media before his best-known molded plastic reliefs. The record distinguishes this oil work from the sprayed acrylic lacquer he later applied to shaped Plexiglas.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Tate records Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix as oil on canvas. He also painted Monna Vanna on canvas and Dantis Amor on mahogany, documenting oil across textile and wooden supports. These paintings are distinct from his watercolors and gouache studies.
David Alfaro Siqueiros

SFMOMA catalogs Penitenciaria (1930) as oil on canvas, while museum records document oil and pyroxylin on panel in other works. These examples show oil across different supports and alongside another paint material, distinct from the lacquer-based media Siqueiros used for experimental murals.
David Hockney

The Smithsonian records Hockney’s Double Entrance (1993–95) as oil on canvas, documenting his continued use of oil after his early career. The medium is distinct from acrylic in A Bigger Splash and his watercolor works. This entry follows the collection’s named paint rather than assuming one medium across his career.
Dia al-Azzawi

Mathaf documents oil on canvas in Al-Azzawi’s Human States (1975), a large series responding to violence against Kurdish people in Iraq. These canvases establish oil in his political painting practice, distinct from the drawings on paper and mixed-media constructions he also made.
Diego Velázquez

The Prado records Las Meninas (1656) and The Spinners as oil on canvas. Velázquez used economical, distinct strokes and soft transitions to make the palace interior and workshop feel observed rather than staged. The medium also appears in his court portraits and religious scenes.
Domenico Beccafumi

Beccafumi painted The Story of Papirius and Marcia in oil on wood, arranging Roman history within imagined city settings. The National Gallery records Tanaquil as originally painted on wood before its later transfer to canvas; that transfer does not change the original support.
Dona Nelson

The Met records oil on canvas in Nelson’s earlier painting Daily News. This work documents a distinct medium from the acrylic and fabric constructions she developed later. The object record names oil and canvas directly, situating it within an earlier period of her practice.
Dwight William Tryon

Tryon’s October is oil on wood panel. He used the rigid support for a quiet landscape in which muted color and delicate transitions establish the time of day. The Met also documents oil on canvas in other landscapes, showing the medium across different supports.
Ed Moses

The Norton Simon Museum catalogs Rafe as oil and collage on canvas; LACMA records another painting as oil and acrylic on canvas. These works document oil alongside acrylic and collage as distinct materials, showing Moses’s layered approach without treating different paint types as interchangeable.
Ed Ruscha

LACMA records Ruscha’s Standard Station (1966) as oil and acrylic on canvas. Its steeply foreshortened gas station turns commercial signage into a monumental image, compressing architecture and text into a graphic composition. The record documents oil alongside acrylic rather than as the work’s sole medium.
Edward Burne-Jones

The National Trust records Love among the Ruins as oil on canvas, a later version of Burne-Jones’s earlier watercolor-and-gouache composition. The oil painting reworks the subject at a larger scale and in a distinct medium. Museum records also document oil in finished mythological and literary scenes.
Egon Schiele

Dead Mother I (1910) combines oil and pencil on wood, enclosing mother and child in broad strokes. For The Small Town III (1913), Schiele used oil and soft pencil on canvas, arranging Krumau’s buildings beside dark water. The Leopold Museum notes that the canvas was sewn from two pieces.
El Greco

The Met catalogs View of Toledo (c. 1600–10) and The Vision of Saint John as oil on canvas. In the landscape, contrasting greens and a storm-lit sky turn a recognizable city view into an expressive scene. Oil also appears in his large religious paintings and portraits.
Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale

Musée d’Orsay records Brickdale’s The Pale Complexion of True Love as oil on canvas. She used the large textile support for a richly staged allegorical scene with carefully rendered figures and decorative detail. This medium is distinct from the watercolors and gouaches she made for literary works on paper.
Elsie Driggs

Pittsburgh (1927) is oil on canvas. Driggs based its gray palette and monumental mill forms on studies of the steelworks she had seen as a child. The painting converts an industrial landscape into a carefully ordered composition, documenting oil in her best-known Precisionist work.
Emma Amos

The Cleveland Museum of Art records oil on canvas in Amos’s Sandy and Her Husband, documenting an earlier figurative painting. The work differs from the acrylic and textile constructions she made later. Its collection entry establishes oil in her practice without treating it as the medium for every work.
Erich Heckel

Brickworks (1907) is oil on canvas, painted during Heckel’s first stay at Dangast. Thick, loose strokes and heightened reds and greens turn factory buildings and a chimney into a strongly contrasting landscape. The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum documents this spontaneous handling in the work.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

In Street, Berlin (1913), Kirchner used oil on canvas to compress a city scene into sharp silhouettes, vivid colors, and closely packed figures. Tense diagonals distinguish this finished urban composition from his smaller street drawings. MoMA identifies the paint medium and support directly.
Eugène Delacroix

Delacroix painted The Natchez in oil on canvas, revisiting the composition for more than a decade before completing it for the 1835 Salon. The work documents oil in his large history paintings, distinct from watercolor and gouache studies he made on paper.
Evelyn De Morgan

The National Trust records The Mourners as oil on canvas, while the De Morgan Foundation describes oil painting as central to her practice. Her pastel and preparatory studies are drawings, not alternate paint types for the finished canvas. This entry reflects the documented medium in a representative allegorical work.
Faith Ringgold

MoMA identifies American People Series #20: Die (1967) as oil on two canvas panels, documenting the medium in Ringgold’s early political paintings. The large diptych presents a crowded scene of racial violence. Collection records distinguish this oil work from her later acrylic story quilts.
Federico Barocci

The National Gallery identifies The Madonna of the Cat as oil on canvas, and the Met records the same medium and support for Saint Francis. Barocci’s preparatory pastel and chalk studies are drawings, distinct from the oil paint used in these finished works.
Federico Zuccari

Italian heritage catalogs record Zuccari’s Self-Portrait and Immaculate Madonna with Saints Terentius and Francis as oil on canvas. He used oil for easel works, while his Florence Cathedral dome frescoes used pigment on plaster. His Dante sheets are chalk-and-ink drawings.
Félix Vallotton

The Met records Landscape at Saint-Jeannet, Provence as oil on canvas; other collection records document oil on cardboard mounted on panel. Vallotton used the medium for sharply bounded scenes across rigid and textile supports, while some works combine oil with gouache on cardboard.
Fernand Khnopff

The Met catalogs Khnopff’s Hortensia as oil on canvas. He used carefully controlled color and a still, closely framed composition to make the portrait feel deliberate and inward. Museum records document oil in other paintings, establishing the medium in his finished portraits and symbolic scenes.
Ford Madox Brown

Brown’s Work, painted over many years, is oil on canvas. He arranged manual laborers and passersby in a tightly detailed London street scene connecting contemporary work to Victorian social life. The collection record documents oil as the medium in this ambitious narrative painting.
Francesco Salviati

The Uffizi records Charity as oil on panel, and the National Gallery of Art catalogs Portrait of a Lady in the same medium and support. Salviati also designed fresco decoration for the Palazzo Vecchio; those wall paintings use pigment on plaster.
Francis Picabia

The Spring (1912) is oil on canvas. MoMA’s infrared research shows Picabia painted over an earlier composition of three geometric figures, merging figures and background into abstraction. Oil also appears in Very Rare Picture on the Earth (1915), alongside metallic paint and attached wooden forms.
François Boucher

Boucher painted pastorals such as Shepherd’s Idyll in oil on canvas, using fluid contours and decorative color for idealized landscapes. The medium also appears in his mythological compositions and portraits. Collection records distinguish these oil paintings from his smaller watercolor and gouache works on paper.
Frans Hals

The Rijksmuseum catalogs The Merry Drinker as oil on canvas. Its animated pose and broken brushwork show Hals using oil to record gesture and expression in a finished picture. His portraits likewise capture small shifts in expression and clothing, unlike more polished court portraiture.
František Kupka

Mme Kupka among Verticals (1910–11) began as an oil portrait of Kupka’s wife and was reworked into densely packed vertical color bands. The canvas documents his shift toward abstraction. MoMA’s catalog identifies the paint as oil, distinct from his watercolor and gouache works.
Franz Marc

Blue Horse I (1911) is oil on canvas, with a vivid blue horse against interlocking hills and plants. Marc departed from naturalistic animal color to suggest a symbolic view of nature. His White Bull, also oil on canvas, arranges an animal among broad, curving forms.
Frederic Edwin Church

Church’s Heart of the Andes is an oil-on-canvas panorama assembled from observed landscape details. For The Parthenon, the Met records oil studies of the Acropolis ruins made during Church’s 1869 visit before he developed the finished canvas. Oil appears in both large compositions and preparatory studies.
Frederick Sandys

Sandys’s Cassandra is recorded as oil on board. He used the firm support for a tightly controlled image, with a strongly defined figure and setting. Other collection records document oil on wood and canvas, showing the medium across several supports rather than one fixed surface.
Gabriele Münter

Christmas Still Life (around 1908–09) is oil on canvas, bringing vivid color into a domestic arrangement. Snow-Covered Fir Tree (1933) is oil on plywood, showing Münter’s use of a rigid support. She also combined oil and watercolor on gray paper for Murnauer Landscape with Fruit Branches.
George Bellows

The National Gallery of Art records Bellows’s Club Night as oil on canvas. He used oil for large boxing scenes that place spectators close to the ring, with forceful brushwork conveying the crowd’s energy. Museum records document the medium in his other urban scenes and portraits.
George Grosz

Explosion (1917) is oil on board, transforming wartime Berlin into collapsing buildings and a vortex of color. In The Poet Max Herrmann-Neisse (1927), oil on canvas, Grosz depicts his friend seated in thought. His Berlin Street (1931), also oil on canvas, shows a harsher city.
George Inness

Inness’s landscapes, including Spring Blossoms, use oil on canvas. He built atmospheric scenes with muted color and light, softening boundaries between trees and terrain. Museum records document oil in his finished landscapes, distinguishing these paintings from watercolor and gouache studies he also made on paper.
George Luks

In portraits such as Boy with Baseball, Luks used oil on canvas for broad, vigorous modeling and strong contrasts. Oil also appears in urban scenes where direct brushwork gives figures and settings an immediate presence. Museum records document it as a principal medium in his finished paintings.
Georges Braque

In Still Life: “2ᵉ étude” (early 1914), Braque combined oil, charcoal, and sand on unprimed canvas. Imitation marble, stenciled text, and overlapping shapes suggest a mandolin, bottle, newspaper, pipe, and glass. Sand adds texture but is not another paint type.
Giacomo Balla

In Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912), Balla multiplied paws, feet, and leash to suggest rapid motion. Speeding Automobile (1912) is oil on wood, built from sweeping forms. Swifts (1913), oil on canvas, turns overlapping arcs into a sequence inspired by birds in flight.
Gino Severini

Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin (1912) combines oil on canvas with attached sequins. Severini fragmented a Parisian dancer, lights, and lettering into overlapping color planes. In Dancer = Propeller = Sea (1915), also oil on canvas, intersecting curves translate a dancer’s movement into rotating forms.
Giorgio de Chirico

The Red Tower (1913) sets a tall structure and equestrian monument in an empty square with disquieting shadows. The Enigma of a Day (1914), also oil on canvas, uses tilted perspectives and classical architecture to make a piazza feel unfamiliar. These paintings preceded Surrealism.
Giorgio Morandi

MoMA records Morandi’s Still Life (1938) as oil on canvas. Compact arrangements of vessels use restrained color and small tonal changes to distinguish familiar objects. The painting documents oil in a carefully constructed studio still life, distinct from the watercolors on paper he made later.
Giorgio Vasari

Japan’s National Museum of Western Art catalogs Vasari’s The Garden of Gethsemane as oil on panel. This devotional painting uses a rigid wooden support, distinct from his frescoes made for architectural interiors. Heritage records document oil as a medium for portable panel paintings as well as wall decoration.
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

The Met identifies The Triumph of Marius as oil on canvas and records The Investiture of Bishop Harold as an oil sketch for a fresco. The sketch let Tiepolo test the sprawling composition before painting on the wall of the Würzburg Residence.
Giulio Romano

The Uffizi catalogs Giulio Romano’s Virgin and Child as oil on panel. This portable devotional picture uses the same medium as his larger panel paintings, while Palazzo Te frescoes were painted on plaster. The collection record distinguishes these separate supports and processes.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo

The National Gallery of Art records Four Seasons in One Head as oil on panel, while the Louvre identifies Winter (1573) as oil on canvas. Arcimboldo’s descriptive details combine pictured produce and foliage into allegorical faces; the support varies by work.
Gustave Courbet

Courbet’s landscapes, including The Source of the Loue, are oil on canvas. He often worked paint with a palette knife, building a material surface that echoes rock, water, and foliage. The Met identifies this as a hallmark of his practice in both landscapes and figure paintings.
Hans von Aachen

KHM records von Aachen’s Tarquinius and Lucretia on canvas and The Procuress on wood. His painted mythological scenes on translucent alabaster show another support. These collection records document his work across canvas, panel, and stone, each requiring a different approach to the image.
Hendrick Goltzius

After establishing his reputation as an engraver and draftsman, Goltzius turned to large-scale oil painting around 1600. The National Gallery of Art catalogs The Fall of Man (1616) as oil on canvas; its monumental figures translate his interest in anatomy from print lines into modeled bodies and color.
Henri-Edmond Cross

Cross used oil for Neo-Impressionist landscapes, including The Artist’s Garden at Saint-Clair, which the Met catalogs as oil on canvas. He built scenes from separate touches of pigment rather than blending colors into a continuous surface, letting adjacent hues describe foliage and light.
Henry Wallis

Tate catalogs Chatterton as oil on canvas, and Birmingham Museums records The Stonebreaker in the same medium. Wallis used oil to stage figures within closely observed interiors and landscapes, joining Victorian narrative detail to the worn clothes, tools, and settings of social life.
Honoré Daumier

Daumier painted social scenes in oil on canvas and wood. The Met catalogs The Third-Class Carriage on canvas and The Drinkers on wood; the National Gallery of Art records thick, visible strokes in In Church. These examples show his varied painted practice alongside his graphic work.
Ilya Repin

Repin used oil for major narrative paintings, including Barge Haulers on the Volga, which the State Russian Museum catalogs as oil on canvas. The horizontal composition gives each laborer an individual presence while linking the group through the towline. The Met’s portrait of Vsevolod Garshin documents oil in his portraits.
Ivan Kliun

The Thyssen-Bornemisza catalogs Kliun’s Composition (1917) as oil on canvas. Independent geometric forms and contrasts of color and light create movement and depth. The museum connects his development to compositions organized around luminosity, documenting oil as the medium for these constructed geometric paintings.
Jacopo Tintoretto

The National Gallery catalogs Tintoretto’s The Origin of the Milky Way as oil on canvas. Mythological figures press into a dramatic diagonal arrangement, with sharp contrasts of light and shadow organizing the scene. The painting shows his use of oil for large, theatrical compositions made for Venetian patrons.
Jacques-Louis David

David’s The Death of Socrates is oil on canvas, a large history painting whose tightly arranged figures and controlled gestures direct attention to Socrates’ final moments. The Met’s sketches and figure studies show how David developed the scene before executing the finished canvas.
James McNeill Whistler

Whistler’s oil paintings often use restrained palettes and carefully balanced tonal relationships. In nocturnes and portraits, he adjusted color and value to keep the overall harmony in view rather than describing every detail equally. The Met records Nocturne in Green and Gold as oil on canvas.
Jasper Francis Cropsey

Cropsey’s Autumn Landscape, Sugar Loaf Mountain, Orange County, New York is oil on canvas. Changing foliage structures the valley view, with autumn color distinguishing wooded slopes and foreground. The large landscape shows his detailed attention to topography and seasonal atmosphere.
Jean Arp

MoMA records Arp’s Two Heads (1927) as oil and cord on canvas. The painted forms share the surface with attached cord, so the picture combines painting with relief-like material. This work documents oil in his practice alongside the cut paper and collage associated with his Dada compositions.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Ingres made portraits and history paintings in oil, including the Met’s Edmond Cavé and the oil study Head of Saint John. Carefully modeled contours and controlled transitions give figures a sharply defined presence. The study documents oil in a preparatory format as well as finished portraiture.
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Corot painted landscapes and figures in oil, including the Met’s Ville-d’Avray on canvas. His oil practice also includes works begun on paper and later laid down on canvas or wood. These composite supports differ from direct canvas painting and are recorded separately in museum catalogs.
Jean-François Millet

Millet used oil for rural subjects such as the Met’s Haystacks: Autumn on canvas and Shepherdess Seated on a Rock on wood. The medium let him model figures and land with sustained passages, linking daily labor to the surrounding landscape.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard

Fragonard used oil for intimate genre scenes and landscapes. The Wallace Collection catalogs The Swing as oil on canvas, while the Met records The Cascade as oil on wood. Fluid brushwork and shifting light show how he used oil across different subjects and supports.
Jean-Marc Nattier

Nattier painted aristocratic portraits in oil, including the Met’s Madame Bergeret de Frouville as Diana and Madame Marsollier and Her Daughter. Polished modeling, elaborate dress, and mythological attributes present sitters as individuals and in idealized roles. Collection records anchor oil as his documented medium.
Joachim Wtewael

The Met catalogs The Golden Age (1605) as oil on copper, while the National Gallery of Art records Moses Striking the Rock as oil on panel. The works show Wtewael using copper and wood for different compositions without conflating their supports.
Joe Cornelius

Cornelius also uses oil-based coatings for trim and other areas where a harder finish is specified. Preparation, ventilation, and compatibility with the surface guide their application. This documents an architectural coating in his contracting work, separate from artist’s oil paint on canvas.
Joe Goode

SFMOMA catalogs Happy Birthday as oil on canvas with a glass bottle, while the Whitney records Small Space as oil with a painted milk bottle. In his torn-cloud works, Goode cut or ripped the canvas to expose fabric beneath the painted image.
Johannes Vermeer

The Milkmaid (c. 1658–59) is oil on canvas. Vermeer sets the brightly lit figure against a simple kitchen wall, using measured color transitions and small highlights to describe bread, fabric, and utensils. Rijksmuseum imaging also revealed objects he later painted over.
John Brett

Brett used oil for detailed landscapes such as Glacier of Rosenlaui, where closely observed rocks, plants, and mountain light make the scene almost topographic. His precise finish links foreground detail to a measured distant view; his watercolors document a separate practice on paper.
John Everett Millais

Millais used oil for large narrative and portrait paintings, including Ophelia on canvas. Careful observation of plants, water, and fabric meets a tightly composed figure, while later portraits show the medium across different subjects and phases of his career.
John Francis Murphy

The Met describes Murphy’s small landscapes as an important part of his 1880s and 1890s production. Its Landscape is oil on canvas and measures just six by eight inches, a compact format for the muted, atmospheric views associated with his Tonalist practice.
John Henry Twachtman

Twachtman used oil on canvas for landscapes such as Arques-la-Bataille and Waterfall. He reduced trees, water, and rock to broad, interlocking passages of color with softened edges, giving the scenes a loose, atmospheric structure and light.
John Sloan

In Dust Storm, Fifth Avenue (1906), Sloan used oil on canvas to show wind funneling around the Flatiron Building. The direct urban scene fixes a fleeting weather event within a recognizable New York street, reflecting the Ashcan painters’ observational approach to everyday city life.
John Wilde

The Smithsonian records Happy, Crazy, American Animals and A Man and Lady at My Place as oil on wood. PAFA catalogs In the Hand as oil on tempered Masonite with a handmade medium whose formula is unspecified. Together, these records document oil-based painting while preserving uncertainty about one work’s binder.
John William Waterhouse

Waterhouse used oil for literary and mythological subjects, including Tate’s The Lady of Shalott and the Art Gallery of South Australia’s Circe Invidiosa, both on canvas. He stages a central female figure within detailed surroundings, using natural forms and gesture to make a story legible through one dramatic moment.
Josephine Halvorson

Halvorson identifies oil on linen as an earlier material in her practice. She explains that oil let her wipe away and revise decisions before she adopted acrylic gouache, whose strokes set quickly. Her own account describes the difference in working time and distinguishes these two media.
Juan Gris

Gris’s Houses in Paris (1911) is oil on canvas, dividing Montmartre buildings into flattened geometric planes. In The Man at a Café (1914), he combined oil with collaged newsprint. The Met describes thick white paint stippled to suggest foam; the pasted newsprint remains a separate material.
Judith Leyster

The National Gallery of Art catalogs Leyster’s Self-Portrait as oil on canvas and Young Boy in Profile as oil on panel. These works show her using oil across different supports, from an expressive self-image to a smaller study. The collection records identify the medium directly.
Jules Bastien-Lepage

Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc is oil on canvas. He places the visionary figure in an observed garden setting, retaining the vegetation and landscape instead of isolating the subject against a neutral background. The painting connects a historical narrative to the natural detail associated with his rural scenes.
Jules Breton

Breton used oil on canvas for rural subjects such as The Song of the Lark. A solitary field worker pauses against the morning landscape, with her upright figure set within a carefully observed horizon and field. The painting joins agricultural labor to a composed view of the French countryside.
Karel van Mander

Museum Boijmans catalogs The Crossing of the Jordan (1605) as oil on panel, while the Rijksmuseum records The Continence of Scipio (1600) as oil on copper. Van Mander’s compositions span two rigid supports; the museum records identify the paint separately from the surface beneath it.
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff

Tower in the Park (1910–12) is oil on canvas. Schmidt-Rottluff transformed a view from Dangast into broad, flaring red, green, blue, and yellow strokes surrounding the tower. The Städel Museum documents both the medium and his departure from naturalistic local color.
Ker-Xavier Roussel

The Musée d’Orsay catalogs Roussel’s La Terrasse as oil on canvas. He used oil to build decorative scenes of figures and landscape, sometimes extending the composition with a painted floral frame. These records document the medium in his large, color-rich Nabi works.
Koo Schadler

Schadler uses oil paint over fully dry tempera in a documented layered method. She lets the egg-tempera underpainting set before applying oil, keeping the two binders distinct in the finished surface. This process differs from paintings made with egg tempera or casein alone.
Kurt Schwitters

MoMA records Revolving (1919) as oil on canvas, combined with wood, metal, cord, cardboard, wool, wire, and leather. Schwitters’s attached fragments turn the support into a relief-like construction; those found objects are separate materials, not types of paint. The work documents oil within his Merz practice.
Leonardo da Vinci

The National Gallery records Leonardo’s The Virgin of the Rocks (c. 1491–1508) as oil on poplar. Layered paint and soft transitions model the figures, rocks, and atmospheric distance. This panel documents his oil practice separately from the experimental wall technique he used for The Last Supper.
Lita Albuquerque

In Four Part Drawing, Albuquerque combined oil and pigment on paper. The work documents oil as part of an experimental mixed-media surface. Her later pigment installations and gold-leaf forms belong to separate material practices, rather than additional paint binders.
Maceptaw Bogun

The Smithsonian records Bogun’s Chapel In-The Fall-Wood (1969) as oil on canvas. Conservators later identified an additional phosphorescent coating, documented separately from the oil paint. The record distinguishes the conventional painted layer from this unusual surface treatment.
Man Ray

MoMA records The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows as oil on canvas and notes that it grew from Man Ray’s collage experiments. The finished image is painted in oil; the cut-paper arrangement informed its development but is not material in the final canvas.
Mark Tobey

MoMA catalogs an untitled work from 1960 as oil on paper, while the Seattle Art Museum identifies Appearances in Time (1962) as oil on canvas. These records show Tobey used oil as well as water-based media in his calligraphic painting.
Maurice de Vlaminck

The Met records The Seine at Chatou and Sunlight on Water as oil paintings. In the riverside scene, Vlaminck applied blue, red, and white directly from tubes in energetic daubs and swirls, describing houses, trees, and a boat through color rather than naturalistic detail.
Maurice Denis

The Met catalogs Denis’s Springtime as oil on canvas. Simplified forms and rhythmic contours arrange the scene into organized areas of color as well as a depiction. The painting documents his use of oil alongside the distemper panels and gouache works also found in his practice.
Max Beckmann

Self-Portrait with a Cigarette (1923), oil on canvas, uses dark outlines and close framing to present Beckmann as a stern public figure. He also painted Departure (1932–35) in oil across three canvases, using the triptych format for an ambiguous allegory rather than a straightforward narrative.
Max Ernst

For Abstract Composition (c. 1927), oil on canvas, Ernst scraped paint over objects beneath the surface, then used tools and patterns to develop texture. In Napoleon in the Wilderness (1941), decalcomania pressed and lifted wet paint to create unpredictable effects. These are techniques, not paint types.
Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de la Peña

The Met identifies Autumn: The Woodland Pond as oil on canvas and notes Diaz’s translucent glazes for foliage and reflected light. The Forest of Fontainebleau uses oil on wood, showing his wooded landscapes on both canvas and small panels.
Njideka Akunyili Crosby

LACMA records oil and acrylic in Bush Girl, I Still Face You, I See You in My Eyes (2015). Crosby layers painted passages with photographic transfer imagery, fabric, collage, colored pencil, and charcoal, keeping distinct materials active within a single complex composition.
Odilon Redon

The Met records The Chariot of Apollo as oil on canvas, a mythological scene in which Redon surrounds the subject with richly colored, dreamlike forms. The medium lets him build luminous, layered color while keeping the image deliberately distant from naturalistic description.
Olga Rozanova

The State Russian Museum documents Rozanova’s Non-Objective Composition in oil on canvas, while Rostov Kremlin Museum records oil in Green Stripe. Across these abstract works, oil supports both structured geometric arrangements and a concentrated study of a single luminous color.
Oskar Kokoschka

Kokoschka painted Portrait of Max Schmidt (1914) in oil on canvas, using free brushwork and dramatic light to suggest character. In Knight Errant (1914–15), agitated strokes and subdued color shape an armored figure in a turbulent landscape.
Otto Dix

Kunstsammlung NRW records Portrait of the Art Dealer Johanna Ey (1924) as oil on canvas. Dix also combined oil and tempera with metal leaf on wood in Dr. Mayer-Hermann (1926), using repeated rounded forms to give the sitter’s face and body a wry emphasis.
Paolo Veronese

The National Gallery records The Family of Darius before Alexander and The Conversion of Mary Magdalene as oil on canvas. Their expansive formats let Veronese coordinate architecture, sumptuous costume, and many figures in theatrical biblical and classical scenes.
Parmigianino

The Uffizi identifies Madonna with the Long Neck as oil on panel. The National Gallery also records oil on wood in The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine and Portrait of a Collector, showing Parmigianino’s use of the medium on carefully prepared supports.
Paul Cadmus

The Smithsonian catalogs Sailors and Floosies (1938) as oil and tempera on linen mounted on composition board. The record names tempera without specifying its binder; the two paints support Cadmus’s closely observed, satirical scene of urban life.
Paul Cézanne

Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire and the Viaduct of the Arc River Valley (1882–85) uses oil on canvas to organize the landscape into measured color areas. In a later Mont Sainte-Victoire, he enlarged the support while painting to extend the view.
Paul Gauguin

The Met records Tahitian Landscape (1892) as oil on canvas and Three Tahitian Women (1896) as oil on wood. Gauguin simplifies tropical greenery, figures, and a hut into broad color areas, carrying flattened forms across two different supports.
Paul Ranson

The Met records Woman Standing Beside a Balustrade with a Poodle as oil on panel, documenting a medium distinct from Ranson’s tempera paintings on canvas. The rigid support carries an intimate interior scene and shows his use of oil at a smaller scale.
Paul Sérusier

Musée d’Orsay identifies The Talisman as oil on a small poplar panel; its flat color and simplified forms embody Nabi ideas about painting as an arrangement of color. The museum also records Breton Wrestling as oil on canvas.
Paul Signac

In Notre-Dame de la Garde (La Bonne Mère), Marseille, Signac arranged rectangular touches of unmixed pigment across an oil-painted canvas. Adjacent strokes build a mosaic-like harbor surface, making the work a focused example of Neo-Impressionist color and optical mixing.
Peter Hurd

Brandywine Museum records Hurd’s Still Life of Stone Jug as oil on canvas. This documented oil work provides a contrast with the egg-tempera portraits and landscapes more associated with his practice, and shows his use of a flexible canvas support.
Peter Paul Rubens

The National Gallery identifies Samson and Delilah (c. 1609–10) as oil on oak panel and documents its chalk ground and pigments. For the much larger Wolf and Fox Hunt (c. 1616), the Met records oil on canvas and Rubens’s collaboration with assistants.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir

The Met records By the Seashore (1883) as oil on canvas. Renoir smoothly modeled the sitter’s face while leaving freer strokes in the background; the beach view draws on Normandy studies, although he likely completed the portrait in his studio.
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes

Musée d’Orsay records The Poor Fisherman (1881) as oil on canvas. Its subdued palette and simplified figures make the shore feel still and monumental. Puvis also painted large canvases for architectural interiors before installation, adapting portable supports to mural scale.
Piet Mondrian

MoMA records Composition with Red, Blue, Black, Yellow, and Gray (1921) and Composition No. II, with Red and Blue (1929) as oil on canvas. Mondrian balanced primary colors and gray against black lines, giving each division a deliberate role.
Pietro Longhi

The Met records The Meeting and The Temptation (both 1746) as oil on canvas. In the National Gallery of Art’s The Faint, Longhi turns a domestic social event into an observant narrative, arranging figures within a compact Venetian interior.
Pontormo

The National Gallery catalogs Pontormo’s Joseph with Jacob in Egypt as oil on wood, while the Uffizi records Supper at Emmaus as oil on canvas. Elongated figures and unexpected color contrasts carry across both panel and canvas paintings.
Ralph Albert Blakelock

The Met records A Waterfall, Moonlight and An Indian Encampment as oil on canvas. For the latter, the museum describes thick paint layers smoothed with pumice, a surface treatment that gives Blakelock’s scene varied texture and subdued light.
Raphael

The Uffizi identifies Madonna of the Goldfinch (before 1506) as oil on wood. The panel broke into fragments when the Nasi home was damaged and was later restored, but the museum still identifies oil as the painting’s original medium.
Rembrandt

The Rijksmuseum records The Night Watch (1642) as oil on canvas. Technical research identifies blue smalt pigment and a lead-containing oil impregnation beneath the ground layer, showing how paint, pigment, and preparation interact in Rembrandt’s monumental civic portrait.
René Magritte

MoMA records The False Mirror (1929) as oil on canvas, with its clouded sky filling the iris of a carefully rendered eye. In The Empire of Light, II (1950), Magritte paired a sunlit sky with a dark, lamplit street, making ordinary scenes feel impossible.
Richard Anuszkiewicz

Buffalo AKG records Water from the Rock (1961–63) as oil on canvas. Anuszkiewicz uses controlled geometric color relationships in this early optical experiment, before acrylic works on board and canvas became central to his vivid Op Art practice.
Richard Estes

MoMA records Double Self-Portrait as oil on canvas. Estes built precise city views from photographs and close observation, using smooth layers to render reflections, windows, and signs with near-photographic clarity. The work documents oil in his meticulous realist practice.
Robert Delaunay

In Windows (1912), Delaunay combined oil and wax on canvas, fragmenting the view into shifting color fields. The Three Windows, the Tower and the Wheel (1912) is oil on canvas; intersecting city forms help connect his Cubist views to Orphist abstraction.
Robert Henri

The Met records Henri’s Dutch Girl in White (1907) as oil on canvas. Immediate brushwork and close observation give the portrait a direct, unidealized presence, with attention fixed on the sitter rather than decorative setting or elaborate narrative.
Robert Irwin

The Whitney documents an early Irwin oil painting marked by fine dots and lines. This flat, carefully patterned work belongs to a phase before he turned toward shaped, light-responsive objects, recording his use of conventional paint before perception and space became his central materials.
Ronald Davis

Seattle Art Museum documents oil on canvas among Davis’s painting methods, alongside his later use of resin. His early gestural oils preceded geometric forms and molded polyester works such as Roto, marking a shift from brush-applied paint to shaped, industrial materials.
Rosa Bonheur

The Met records The Horse Fair as oil on canvas. Bonheur’s close study of animal movement shaped the large scene, where horses turn and press through the crowd with coordinated force; careful anatomy gives their motion weight and specificity.
Rosso Fiorentino

The Uffizi records Rosso Fiorentino’s Moses Defends the Daughters of Jethro as oil on canvas and Enthroned Madonna and Child with Four Saints as oil on panel. These works show the medium across two supports, with tense color contrasts and elongated figures.
Salvador Dalí

MoMA records The Persistence of Memory (1931) as oil on canvas. Dalí rendered the limp clocks and distant Catalan coast with precise, illusionistic detail, making the small painting’s imaginary landscape appear carefully observed and unsettlingly real.
Simeon Solomon

Christie’s records Solomon’s Juliette as oil on canvas, documenting a finished painting in a medium distinct from his water-based figure studies. The canvas format supports a developed image rather than the delicate paper works made with watercolor and bodycolor.
Sonia Delaunay

MoMA records Portuguese Market (1915) as oil and wax on canvas. Market stalls and local textiles become a setting for strong red, green, blue, and orange contrasts; the wax is an added material, not evidence that the work uses encaustic paint.
Sophie Taeuber-Arp

MoMA’s exhibition checklist records Taeuber-Arp’s Composition (1930) as oil with metallic flakes on canvas. Her painted Head (1920), also oil, is made on wood as an object rather than a flat panel, showing the medium across distinct forms.
Theo van Doesburg

MoMA records Rhythm of a Russian Dance (1918) as oil on canvas, translating a dancer’s movement into separated color planes. In Counter-Composition VII (1924), oil-painted rectangles tilt into a diamond-like arrangement, advancing his dynamic Elementarist approach.
Théodore Rousseau

The Met records A Meadow Bordered by Trees as oil on wood and A Stream in the Auvergne as oil on paper later laid on canvas. In Sunset near Arbonne, the warm brown panel shows through the paint as a midtone.
Thomas Cole

The Met records Cole’s The Oxbow as oil on canvas and its preparatory study as oil and pencil on composition board. Cole tested composition, color balance, and rhythm in the smaller study before developing the expansive landscape on the finished canvas.
Thomas Eakins

The Pennsylvania Academy records Eakins’s The Gross Clinic as oil on canvas. Tightly observed figures, measured light, and anatomical detail give the operating-room scene physical presence, documenting oil in one of his major public compositions.
Thomas Moran

The Met records The Teton Range as oil on canvas, while the National Gallery of Art identifies Green River Cliffs, Wyoming as an oil painting. Moran used the medium for western landscapes that combine firsthand observation with carefully composed geological forms.
Thomas Wilmer Dewing

The Met records Dewing’s Green and Gold as oil on canvas. A restrained palette and finely layered brushwork focus attention on a solitary figure, carrying Whistler’s influence into an interior defined by stillness and open space.
Thornton Dial

The Smithsonian catalogs Dial’s Life Go On as oil on canvas, a distinct format from his dense found-material assemblages. Oil carries the painted image on flexible textile support, showing a separate part of his practice from enamel- and spray-painted constructions.
Umberto Boccioni

MoMA records The City Rises (1910) and States of Mind I: The Farewells (1911) as oil on canvas. Boccioni overlaps figures and divides color to convey urban motion and a railway departure, while his charcoal and chalk studies remain separate drawing media.
Ushio Shinohara

Art Platform Japan records oil and fluorescent paint on plywood in Shinohara’s Doll Festival, with plastic board listed as another material. The construction shows how he combined paint with an assembled support rather than using oil in a conventional stretched-canvas format.
Victor Vasarely

Buffalo AKG records Vega-Nor (1969) as oil on canvas. Vasarely arranged colored squares in a regular grid so the central warm tones seem to bulge from the flat surface, while narrower cells at the edges appear to recede.
Vilmos Huszár

The Thyssen-Bornemisza records Baccarat Game (c. 1928–29) as oil on canvas. Huszár reduces card players to geometric color planes, while his oil painting Composition “De Stijl” applies the medium to an abstract arrangement with carefully balanced proportions.
William Holman Hunt

Tate records Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience as oil on canvas. Hunt renders the room’s furnishings and surfaces in meticulous detail, using observed textures to make the narrative setting convincing. This precise finish exemplifies his Pre-Raphaelite approach to contemporary life.