In combination with written texts, pen drawings are among the oldest artistic documents. Already in classical times, texts were illustrated with firm contours and sparse interior details. During the Middle Ages, marginal drawings and book illustrations were time and again pre-sketched, if not definitively executed, with the pen. In book painting, decidedly delineatory styles developed in which the brush was also employed in the manner of a pen drawing: for example, in the Carolingian school of Reims, which produced the Utrecht Psalter in the 9th century, and also in southern Germany, where a separate illustrative form with line drawings was widespread with the Biblia Pauperum (“Poor People’s Bibles,” biblical picture books used to instruct large numbers of people in the Christian faith). The thin-lined outline sketch is also characteristic of the earliest individual drawings of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Sketches after ancient sculptures or after nature as well as compositions dealing with familiar motifs form the main themes of these drawings. Such sheets were primarily used as models for paintings; gathered in sketchbooks, they were often handed on from one generation to the next. The practical usefulness of these drawings is attested by the supplements added to them by younger artists and by the fact that many metalpoint drawings that had become hard to decipher were redrawn with the pen, as shown by the sketchbooks of the 15th-century Italian artist Antonio Pisanello, now broken up and preserved in several different collections.

In the 16th century, the artistic range of the pen drawing reached an individual articulation that it hardly ever attained again. Every artist was free to exploit with the pen the formal possibilities that corresponded to his talents. Thus Leonardo used a precise stroke for his scientific drawings; Raphael produced relaxed sketches, in which he probed for forms and variations of form; Michelangelo drew with short strokes reminiscent of chisel work; Titian contrasted light and dark by means of hachures laid broadly over the completed figures. Among the Northerners, Dürer mastered all the possibilities of pen drawing, from quick notation to the painstakingly executed autonomous drawing, ranging from a purely graphic and delineatory technique to a spatial and plastic modelling one; it is no wonder that he stimulated so many other artists. The subjective attitude of the later 16th century is often expressed more clearly in Mannerist drawings—characterized by spatial incongruity and excessive elongation of the human figures, which are as revelatory of the artist’s personality as handwriting—than it is in completed works of painting and sculpture. A special form of exact drawing is found in models for engravings; some of these were directly mounted on the wood block; some anticipate the style of the copperplate engraving in the pen-drawing stage, with waxing and waning lines, delicate stroke layers, and cross-hatching for spatial and plastic effects.

In the 17th century, the pen drawing took second place to combined techniques, especially wash, a sweep or splash of colour, applied with the brush. An open style of drawing that merely hints at contours, along with contrasting thin and powerful strokes, endowed the line itself with expressive qualities. In his numerous drawings, Rembrandt in particular achieved an exceedingly subtle plastic characterization and even light values through the differentiation of stroke layers and the combination of various pens and brushes.

Additional techniques came to the fore in the 18th century, with the pen sketch providing the scaffold for the drawing that was carried out in a pictorial style. Only decorative sketches and practical studies were laid out more often as linear drawings.

The closed, thin-contour drawing regained its importance with Neoclassicism at the end of the 18th century. The Nazarenes (the nickname of the Lucas Brotherhood—later Guild of St. Luke, who lived in monastic style) and Romantics consciously referred to the early Renaissance manner of drawing, modelling with thin lines. With closed contours, carefully set hair-and-shadow strokes, and precise parallel hachures, they attained plastic values by purely graphic means.

This technique was again followed by a more pictorially oriented phase, culminating in the late 19th century in the recognition of drawing as the most immediate and personal expression of the artist’s hand. The pure pen drawing took its place by the side of other highly esteemed art forms. The English Art Nouveau artist Aubrey Beardsley at the end of the 19th century applied the direct black–white contrast to planes, while in the 20th century the French masters Henri Matisse and Picasso reduced the object to a mere line that makes no claim to corporeal illusion. A large number of illustrators, as well as the artists who draw the comic strips, prefer the clear pen stroke. In the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky’s nonrepresentational compositions, finally, the independence of the line as an autonomous formal value became a new theme in drawing. In the hair-thin automatist seismograms (so-called because of their resemblance to the records of earthquakes) of the 20th-century German artist Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze), which are sensitive to the slightest stirring of the hand, this theme leads to a new dimension transcending all traditional concepts of a representational art of drawing.

Brush drawings

Although the brush is best suited to the flat application of pigments—in other words, to painting—its use in a clearly delineatory function, with the line dominating and (a crucial property of brush drawing) in monochrome fashion, can be traced back to prehistoric times.

All of the above-mentioned drawing inks have been used as dyes in brush drawings, often with one and the same pigment employed in combined pen-and-brush work. Still greater differentiation in tone is often obtained through concentrated or thinned mediums and with the addition of supplementary ones. To the latter belong chiefly distemper, a paint in which the pigments are mixed with an emulsion of egg or size or both, and watercolours, which can be used along with bistre and drawing ink. Even oils can sometimes be used for individual effects in drawing, as in the works of Jacob Jordaens.

Sinopia, the preliminary sketch for a monumental wall painting, was done with the brush and has all the characteristics of a preparatory, form-probing drawing. The sketch was carried out directly on the appropriate spot and covered over with a thin layer of plaster, on which the pictorial representation was then painted.

The brush drawing differs from the pen drawing by its greater variation in stroke width, and by the stroke itself, which sets in more smoothly and is altogether less severely bordered. Early brush drawings nonetheless show a striking connection with the technique of the pen drawing. The early examples of the 15th century completely follow the flow of contemporaneous pen drawings. Leonardo’s or Dürer’s pen drawings, with their short, waxing and waning stroke layers, refine the system of pen drawing; many 16th-century artists used a comparable technique. The brush drawing for chiaroscuro sheets on tinted paper was popular because Chinese white, the main vehicle of delineation in this method, is more easily applied with the brush than the pen and because the intended pictorial effect is more easily attained, thanks to the possibility of changing abruptly to a plane representation.

Such representations are particularly distinctive as done by Vittore Carpaccio and Palma il Giovane in Venice and in a Mannerist spotting technique used by Parmigianino. In the 16th century, the brush nevertheless played a greater role as a supporting than as an independently form-giving instrument. Pure brush drawings were rare even in the 17th century, although the brush played a major role in landscapes, in which, by tinting of varying intensity, it ideally fulfilled the need to provide for all desired degrees of spatial depth and strength of lighting. Dutch artists, such as Adriaen Brouwer, Adriaen van Ostade, and Jan Steen, as well as the French artist Claude Lorrain, transcended the limits of drawing in the narrower meaning of the term by doing brushwork limited to a few tones within a monochrome scale, giving the impression of a pictorial watercolour.

Although the coloristically inclined 18th century was little interested in the restriction to a few shadings within one colour value, Jean-Honoré Fragonard raised this technique to perfection, with all its possibilities of sharply accented contours, soft delineation, delicate tones, and deep shadows. The brush drawings of the Spanish painter Francisco Goya must also be counted among the great achievements of this technique. In his strong plastic effects, the English painter George Romney made the most of the contrast between the white foundation and the broad brushstrokes tinted in varying intensities. Other English artists, among them Alexander Cozens, John Constable, and J.M.W. Turner, took advantage of the delicately graded pictorial possibilities for their landscape studies.

In the 19th century, the French artists Théodore Géricault, Eugène Delacroix, and Constantin Guys still followed the character of the brush drawing, even though it was already being replaced by the variegated watercolour and gouache painting, a method of painting with opaque colours that have been ground in water and mingled with a preparation of gum. In modern drawing, the brush has regained some importance as an effective medium for contrasting planes and as carrier of the theme; in this, the dry brush has proven itself a useful tool for the creation of a granular surface structure.

Combinations of various techniques

The combination of various techniques plays a greater role in drawing than in all other art forms. Yet it is necessary, in the numerous drawings in which two or more mediums are involved, to distinguish between those in which the mediums were changed in the course of artistic genesis and those in which an artistic effect based on a combination of mediums was intended from the beginning.

In the first case, one is confronted with a preliminary sketch, as it were, of the eventual drawing: the basic structure with some variations is tried out in charcoal, chalk, metalpoint, pencil, or some other (preferably dry and easily corrected) material and then carried out in a stronger and more durable medium. Most pen drawings are thus superimposed on a preliminary sketch. The different materials actually represent two separate stages of the same artistic process.

More relevant artistically is the planned combination of different techniques that are meant to complement each other. The most significant combination from the stylistic point of view is that of pen and brush, with the pen delineating the contours that denote the object and the brush providing spatial and plastic as well as pictorial—that is, colour—values. The simplest combined form is manuscript illumination, where the delineated close contours are filled in with colour. The drawing may actually be improved if this is done by a hand other than the draftsperson’s or at a later time.

More important is brushwork that supplements linear drawing, in which entire segments may be given over to one technique or the other; for example, the considerable use of white (which is hard to apply with the pen) in drawings on tinted paper. In similar complementary fashion the brush may be used for plastic modelling as a way of highlighting, that is indicating the spots that receive the greatest illumination. The technique of combined pen-and-brush drawing was favoured by the draftspeople of Germany and the Netherlands, especially in the circle around Dürer and the south German Danube School. Shadows, too, can be inserted in a drawing with dark paint. The illusion of depth can also be achieved with white and dark colours in a pure chalk technique.

In contrast to these methods, which still belong to a linear system of drawing, is the flat differentiation of individual segments of a work in (usually) the same medium: wash. Various bodies and objects are evenly tinted with the brush within or along the drawn contours. Planes are thus contrasted with lines, enhancing the illusionary effect of plasticity, space, and light and shadow. This modelling wash has been used again and again since the 16th century, sometimes in combination with charcoal, chalk, or pencil drawings. A further refinement, used particularly in landscape drawings, is wash in varying intensities; additional shadings in the sense of atmospheric phenomena, such as striking light and haze merging into fog and cloud, can be rendered through thinning of the colour or repeated covering over a particular spot. A chromatic element entered drawing with the introduction of diluted indigo, known in the Netherlands from the East India trade; it is not tied to objects but used in spatial and illusionist fashion, by Paul Brill and Hans Bol in the 16th and 17th centuries, for example. The mutual supplementation and correlation of pen and brush in the wash technique was developed most broadly and consistently in the 17th century, in which the scaffold, so to speak, of the pen drawing became lighter and more open, and brushwork integrated corporeal and spatial zones. The transition from one technique to the other—from wash pen drawings to brush drawings with pen accents—took place without a break. Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin in 16th- and 17th-century France are major representatives of the latter technique, and Rembrandt once again utilized all its possibilities to the full.

Whereas this method served—within the general stylistic intentions of the 17th century—primarily to elucidate spatial and corporeal proportions, the artists of the 18th century employed it to probe this situation visually with the aid of light. The unmarked area, the spot left empty, has as much representational meaning as the pen contours, the lighter or darker brush accent, and the tinted area.

The art of omission plays a still greater role, if possible, in the later 19th century and in the 20th. Paul Cézanne’s late sheets, with their sparse use of the pencil and the carefully measured out colour nuances, may be considered the epitome of this technique. As the colouring becomes increasingly varied through the use of watercolours to supplement a pen or metalpoint drawing, one leaves the concept of drawing in the strict sense of the term. According to the quality and quantity of the mediums employed, one then speaks of “drawings with watercolour,” “watercolourized drawings,” and “watercolours on preliminary drawings.” The predominant stroke character, rather than the fact that paper is the carrier, is the chief feature when deciding whether or not the work may legitimately be called a drawing.

The combination of dry and fluid drawing mediums provides a genuine surface contrast that may be exploited for sensuous differentiation. Here again a distinction must be made between various ways of applying the identical medium—for example, charcoal and charcoal dust in a water solution or, more frequently, sanguine and sanguine rubbed in with a wet brush—and the stronger contrast brought about by the use of altogether different mediums. Chalk drawings are frequently washed with bistre or watercolour, after the principle of the washed pen drawing. Stronger contrasts, however, can be obtained if the differing techniques are employed graphically, as the Flemish draftspeople of the 17th century liked to do. The Chinese ink wash of chalk drawings also contributes to the illusion of spatial depth. Along with such Dutch painters as Jan van Goyen and members of the family van de Velde, Claude Lorrain achieved great mastery in this technique. The differentiated treatment of the foreground with pen and brush and the background with chalk renders spatial depth plausible and plastic. In modern art, the use of different mediums—whether for plastic differentiation, such as Henry Moore carried out with unequalled mastery in his Shelter Drawings, or only for the purpose of contrasting varied surface stimuli of nonrepresentational compositions as well as the enrichment with colours and even with collage elements (the addition of paper, metal, or other actual objects) broadens the concept of the drawing so that it becomes an autonomous picture the mixed technique of which transcends the borderline between drawing and painting.