Quick answer: Oil paints have been used by most of the major painters in Western art since the fifteenth century, including Jan van Eyck, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velázquez, Turner, Monet, Van Gogh, Sargent, Georgia O’Keeffe, Lucian Freud and Gerhard Richter. Today oil remains the primary medium for portrait painters, realist and classical painters, many landscape and still-life artists, and a large share of contemporary gallery painters, because of its slow drying, color depth and layering range.
What painters use oil paints? Almost every name you would recognize from a museum wall between about 1430 and 1900, and a very large number since. The medium’s dominance was so complete for so long that “painting” and “oil painting” were nearly synonymous in European art. But the question is also worth asking about the present: who still chooses oil now that acrylics, digital tools and every other option exist, and why?
This explainer answers both versions. It starts with what oil painting is in art, then moves through the painters who defined the medium era by era, and finishes with the kinds of artists who rely on it today. For readers who want to follow those painters into practice, our guide to oil paints suited to realist work looks at the tube qualities that matter for the detailed, layered approach many of them used.
What Is Oil Painting in Art?
Oil painting is the practice of painting with pigments bound in a drying oil, usually linseed, sometimes walnut, poppy or safflower. The oil hardens by reacting with oxygen rather than by evaporating, which gives the paint a long open time, a flexible film and a depth of color that few other binders match.
Those properties enabled specific techniques: transparent glazing over opaque underlayers, seamless blending of soft edges, thick impasto that holds the mark of the brush, and the ability to rework a passage days after it was begun. The history of who used oil paint is largely the history of painters discovering and exploiting one or more of those possibilities.
The Painters Who Established Oil
Early Netherlandish masters
Oil-based paint existed well before the Renaissance, used for decorative work and occasionally in panel painting, but it was painters in the Low Countries in the early 1400s who turned it into a fine-art system. Jan van Eyck is the name most associated with this shift. Works such as the Arnolfini Portrait show what oil made possible: translucent glazes building jewel-like color, reflections in metal and glass, and textures from fur to brocade rendered with a precision tempera could not match. Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling and Hugo van der Goes worked in the same tradition.
The Italian Renaissance
Oil spread south through the second half of the fifteenth century. Antonello da Messina is often credited with helping bring Netherlandish oil methods to Venice. Giovanni Bellini adopted oil and passed it to his students. Leonardo da Vinci used oil’s slow drying to develop sfumato, the smoky, edgeless blending seen in the Mona Lisa. Raphael and Michelangelo used it for panel work alongside their fresco commissions.
The Venetians and the move to canvas
Titian did more than almost anyone to turn oil into an expressive rather than purely descriptive medium. His late works are built from loose, layered strokes, glazes and scumbles over coarse canvas, a method that influenced painters for centuries. Giorgione, Tintoretto and Veronese belong to the same school. Venice’s humid climate made fresco unreliable, which pushed painters toward oil on canvas and helped make that combination the European standard.
Baroque and Golden Age Oil Painters
The seventeenth century is in many ways the high point of oil technique.
| Painter | Region | What they drew from oil |
|---|---|---|
| Caravaggio | Italy | Dramatic chiaroscuro, dark grounds, direct painting without extensive drawing |
| Peter Paul Rubens | Flanders | Fluid, fast handling; thin darks and thick lights over light grounds |
| Rembrandt van Rijn | Netherlands | Heavy impasto in lights, deep glazed shadows, expressive surface |
| Johannes Vermeer | Netherlands | Luminous glazes, pointillé highlights, precise light effects |
| Diego Velázquez | Spain | Economical, loose brushwork that reads as detail at a distance |
| Frans Hals | Netherlands | Rapid alla prima strokes capturing movement and expression |
| Anthony van Dyck | Flanders and England | Elegant portraiture with refined blending |
Rembrandt and Velázquez in particular are studied closely by painters today because their methods, thin lean underlayers, fat impasto lights, glazed darks, still describe sound oil practice.
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century
Portraiture and landscape in Britain
Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds and later Thomas Lawrence made oil portraiture a British specialty. John Constable painted oil sketches outdoors to capture changing skies, and J. M. W. Turner pushed oil toward near-abstraction with scumbled light and dissolved form.
French academic and Romantic painters
Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres represent the polished, highly finished academic approach. Eugène Delacroix and Théodore Géricault loosened it with broken color and visible brushwork.
Realists and Impressionists
The invention of the collapsible metal paint tube in 1841 made oil paint portable for the first time. Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet painted rural subjects with earthy, palette-knife surfaces. Then Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley and Berthe Morisot took tubes outdoors and painted light directly, with short strokes of unmixed color. Édouard Manet bridged the two camps.
Post-Impressionists
Vincent van Gogh is perhaps the most recognizable oil painter in the world, his thick, directional impasto a direct product of the medium’s body. Paul Cézanne built form from small planes of color. Paul Gauguin flattened color into decorative shapes. Georges Seurat applied oil in dots.
American painters
John Singer Sargent remains a touchstone for direct, confident oil handling. Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, James Whistler and the Hudson River School painters including Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church all worked primarily in oil.
Twentieth Century: Oil in a Crowded Field
The twentieth century introduced real alternatives, yet oil stayed central.
- Pablo Picasso worked in oil throughout his career across every style, and Georges Braque alongside him.
- Henri Matisse used oil for saturated flat color.
- Edward Hopper, Grant Wood and Andrew Wyeth (though Wyeth favored tempera) represent American realism in and around oil.
- Georgia O’Keeffe painted her flowers and landscapes in oil.
- Frida Kahlo worked mostly in oil on metal and masonite.
- Salvador Dalí and René Magritte used oil’s smooth blending for Surrealist precision.
- Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell made oil the medium of gestural abstraction, exploiting its slipperiness and slow drying.
- Mark Rothko mixed oil with other materials for his layered color fields.
- Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud kept oil at the heart of British figurative painting.
- Gerhard Richter moves between photorealist oil paintings and squeegeed abstract oils.
Acrylic arrived commercially in the 1950s and was adopted by painters such as Helen Frankenthaler, David Hockney for a period, and many Pop and hard-edge artists. But even then, oil kept its place for anyone who needed blending, depth or a long working time.
What Kinds of Painters Use Oil Paints Today?
Away from famous names, the medium has clear constituencies in current practice.
| Type of painter | Why oil |
|---|---|
| Portrait painters | Skin requires soft transitions and subtle color that wet-into-wet oil handles better than any fast-drying medium |
| Classical realists and atelier-trained artists | Traditional methods such as grisaille underpainting and glazing were developed for oil and still work best in it |
| Plein air landscape painters | Paint stays workable for an entire outdoor session; the tradition from Constable to the Impressionists is oil-based |
| Still-life and trompe-l’oeil painters | Glazing gives glass, metal and fruit their depth; fine detail is easier with slow-drying paint |
| Contemporary gallery painters | Oil carries a surface richness and historical weight that many artists and collectors value |
| Abstract and gestural painters | Body, impasto, scrapability and long open time suit large expressive work |
| Art students | Most painting programs still teach oil as the core medium |
| Serious hobbyists | The forgiving working time makes oil easier to learn than its reputation suggests |
Water-mixable oils have also brought the medium to painters who avoided it because of solvents, including people painting in apartments, classrooms and shared spaces.
Why These Painters Chose Oil Over Alternatives
Looking across six centuries, the reasons stay remarkably consistent:
- Time. Oil lets a painter blend, adjust and rethink. Leonardo’s sfumato and Sargent’s reworked passages both depend on paint that stays open.
- Depth. Transparent glazes over light grounds produce the glow of van Eyck and Vermeer. Oil’s refractive properties keep colors saturated when dry.
- Range. The same tube can be thinned to a wash or piled into Van Gogh’s ridges.
- Durability. Properly made oil paintings from the 1400s survive in good condition, which mattered to patrons and still matters to collectors.
- Tradition and teaching. Each generation learned oil from the one before, so the knowledge base is deep and accessible.
Painters who want to compare oil with a water-based opaque medium often look at gouache; our comparison of oil paint versus gouache spells out where each fits. And for those moving between mediums on one canvas, the rules in our piece on using oil paint over acrylic explain why oil can go on top of acrylic but not the reverse.
Learning From How These Painters Worked
Knowing which painters used oil is more useful when paired with how they used it, because their methods are still teachable.
- The Flemish layered method (van Eyck, Memling): a precise drawing, a monochrome underpainting, then multiple thin transparent glazes. Slow, but it produces unmatched luminosity. Suited to still life and detailed realism.
- The Venetian method (Titian, Tintoretto): a toned ground, loose opaque block-in, glazes and scumbles alternated over many sessions. Flexible and forgiving; a good fit for figure and landscape painters who like to revise.
- Direct painting (Hals, Sargent, Sorolla): mixing the final color and placing it in one confident stroke, finishing wet-into-wet in a session or two. Demands accurate color judgment and rewards practice.
- Impressionist broken color (Monet, Pissarro): small strokes of relatively pure color laid side by side so they mix optically. Depends on oil’s body to keep the strokes distinct.
- Expressive impasto (Van Gogh, de Kooning): thick paint applied with loaded brushes and knives, where the texture carries as much meaning as the color.
Museum visits, high-resolution images from museum websites and technical studies published by conservation departments are all ways to examine these surfaces closely. Many museums now publish infrared and X-ray images that reveal underdrawings and changes, which show how much reworking oil allowed.
Painters Who Did Not Primarily Use Oil
It is worth noting the exceptions, because they clarify what oil offers by contrast.
- Egg tempera painters before and alongside the early oil period: Giotto, Fra Angelico, Botticelli (largely tempera), and in the twentieth century Andrew Wyeth.
- Fresco specialists such as Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel and Diego Rivera for his murals.
- Watercolorists such as Albrecht Dürer’s studies, Turner’s sketches and Winslow Homer’s later work.
- Acrylic adopters including Helen Frankenthaler, Bridget Riley and Roy Lichtenstein.
- Pastel specialists such as Edgar Degas in his later years and Mary Cassatt in part.
Many of these artists also used oil at some point; the point is that the alternatives tended to serve speed, portability, wall-scale permanence or a particular matte look, while oil served depth, blending and layered revision.
FAQs
Who was the first painter to use oil paints?
No single inventor is known. Oil-based paints were used in parts of Europe and Asia centuries before the Renaissance, but Jan van Eyck and his Netherlandish contemporaries in the early 1400s are credited with developing oil into a refined fine-art technique.
Did Leonardo da Vinci use oil paint?
Yes. His panel paintings, including the Mona Lisa, are in oil, and his sfumato blending depends on oil’s slow drying.
Did Van Gogh use oil paints?
Yes. His thick, textured surfaces are oil paint applied heavily from the tube and with a loaded brush.
Do modern artists still use oil paint?
Very much so. Oil remains the leading medium for portraiture, classical realism, plein air landscape and much contemporary gallery painting, alongside acrylic and mixed media.
Why did painters switch from tempera to oil?
Oil blends smoothly, allows transparent glazing, dries slowly enough to rework, and forms a flexible film that works on canvas. Tempera dries almost instantly and must be built in fine hatched strokes on rigid panels.
Is oil paint better than acrylic for realism?
Most realist painters prefer oil for its blending and glazing, though skilled painters achieve realism in acrylic with retarders and careful layering. The choice depends on working style and environment.
Final Thoughts
From van Eyck’s glazes to Richter’s squeegees, the painters who use oil paints span nearly every style and century of Western art, and the medium’s hold on portraiture, realism and expressive painting continues today. What unites them is a need for time, depth and range that oil delivers more reliably than anything else. If their work has made you want to try the medium with a realist approach, start with paint that gives you the control they relied on; our guide to the best oil paints for realism explains what to look for.
