Grisaille is painting entirely in shades of gray. Painters use it for two quite different purposes: to settle the light and shadow of a picture before any color is involved, and to imitate carved stone.
The name comes from gris, French for gray, and is said roughly as gree-ZYE. A work described as en grisaille is one carried out in that monochrome scheme, whether it is a finished painting or a stage on the way to one.
Why paint without color
Because values are what make a picture read
Everything that makes a painted object look solid is a matter of light and dark rather than hue. Take a photograph of a convincing painting, remove the color, and the form is still there. Take a painting whose values are wrong and add beautiful color, and it stays flat.
Working in gray first separates the hard problem from the pleasant one. You settle where the light falls and how deep the shadows go, with nothing to distract you, and only then decide what color things are.
Because gray can pretend to be stone
The other use is older and more literal. Painted in gray, a figure looks carved. Medieval and Netherlandish painters used this constantly, giving churches the appearance of sculpture at a fraction of the cost of sculpting anything, and giving painted altarpieces a sober outer face.
This is why so many great grisailles are on the outsides of triptychs. Closed, on ordinary days, the altarpiece showed restrained gray figures that looked like statues. Opened for a feast day, it revealed full color. The contrast was the point, and it is the single most useful thing to know about where grisaille turns up in art history.
The two working methods
These get confused constantly, including in most explanations online, so it is worth being precise.
Direct grisaille is a finished monochrome painting. The gray image is the artwork, and nothing goes on top of it. Bruegel and Rembrandt both made pictures this way.
Indirect grisaille is the underpainting method, and the order matters: the gray layer comes first, and transparent color glazes go on top of it. The monochrome underneath supplies all the modeling; the glazes supply only the color, tinting the light and dark that are already established. Because the glazes are transparent, the value structure beneath shows through, which is what gives paintings built this way their depth and their inner glow.
Anyone who tells you indirect grisaille means laying color down first and painting gray on top has it backwards. Gray over color simply covers the color up.
Making it work in practice
Grisaille is unforgiving, because with hue removed there is nowhere for an error in value to hide. Three things help:
- Use a limited number of steps. Mix five or six distinct grays from black and white and stick to them, rather than blending an infinite gradient. Restricting the range forces you to decide what belongs in shadow and what does not.
- Do not use pure black at full strength. It flattens everything near it. Reserve your darkest value for the very deepest accents and keep the shadow mass a step lighter.
- Squint at it. Half-closing your eyes collapses the picture into large tonal shapes, which is exactly what you are trying to get right.
If you intend to glaze color over the top, keep the whole underpainting a shade lighter than the final picture should be. Every glaze darkens what is beneath it.
Grisaille in the history of art
Giotto, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua
Finished around 1305, the chapel's walls carry Giotto's great narrative cycle in full color, and along the base runs a row of monochrome figures representing the Virtues and Vices. They are painted to look like carved stone reliefs, and they are among the earliest and most influential grisailles anywhere.
Hugo van der Goes, the Portinari Altarpiece
Painted around 1475 and now in the Uffizi in Florence, this enormous triptych shows the Adoration of the Shepherds. It was commissioned by Tommaso Portinari, who ran the Medici bank's operation in Bruges for some forty years, and it reached Florence in 1483, where Italian painters studied it closely.
The panel above is the interior, in full color. The grisaille is on the outer wings, where an Annunciation is painted to look like pale stone figures. Closed, it is gray and quiet. Open, it is one of the most richly colored pictures of the century.
Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights
Bosch, born around 1450 and working in what is now the Netherlands, made the most famous triptych in Western art: paradise, earthly pleasure and hell across three riotous panels.
Its outer face, seen when the wings are shut, is painted almost entirely in gray-green monochrome and shows the world on the third day of creation, a flat disc enclosed in a transparent sphere. It is a grisaille, and the shock of opening those doors onto the color inside is the whole design.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery
Painted in 1565, this small panel is a true grisaille and a deliberate one. Bruegel kept it himself rather than selling it. The scene is Christ stooping to write in the dust while the accusers wait, and the absence of color makes it grave and hushed in a way a colored version would not be. There is none of the broad humor of the peasant scenes here.
Andrea del Sarto, the Chiostro dello Scalzo, Florence
The best sustained demonstration of the technique anywhere. Across two decades, del Sarto painted the entire cloister in monochrome, telling the life of Saint John the Baptist in gray on gray. Anyone who thinks grisaille must be dull should look at these, and note that the subject is the Baptist rather than the standard Nativity cycle.
Hans Memling, the Donne Triptych and the Last Judgment
Memling was born at Seligenstadt in Germany around 1430 to 1440 and spent his working life in Bruges, which is why he is counted among the Early Netherlandish painters rather than the German ones.
Both of his best-known triptychs follow the convention. The Donne Triptych in London shows the Virgin and Child enthroned with saints and the donor family; its closed wings carry grisaille saints painted as statues. The Last Judgment, now in Gdansk, places Christ in judgment in the center panel, with the saved led into heaven on the left and the damned driven into hell on the right, and again the exterior is grisaille.
Rembrandt, Christ Presented to the People
Rembrandt's oil sketch of 1634, often called Ecce Homo, is a grisaille worked up as the design for a print. It is a working document rather than a showpiece, and it is all the more instructive for that: you can watch him deciding where the light goes.
One correction worth making, since it is repeated everywhere. Rembrandt was celebrated early and then fell out of fashion, was declared insolvent in 1656 and died with very little. The image of a painter beloved by everyone throughout his life is not accurate.
And Picasso's Guernica, with a caveat
Painted in 1937 after the bombing of the Basque town, Guernica is enormous and entirely black, white and gray. People often call it a grisaille and the description is not unreasonable, but it is worth noting that Picasso was not reaching for the sculptural or preparatory meaning of the term. He drained the color for the same reason a newspaper photograph has none.
Trying it yourself
Grisaille is one of the few genuinely useful exercises available to a beginner, because it isolates the skill that improves everything else.
Take any simple object, put a single lamp beside it, and paint it in black and white alone. Do it in an hour. Then do it again tomorrow. You will learn more about why your paintings look flat from three of these than from a month of careful color work.
If you would rather practice seeing values without committing to a whole painting, a numbered canvas is a reasonable back door into the same skill. The palette is decided for you, and several hours of filling in someone else's carefully judged light and shadow teaches your eye a good deal. Our own designs are in the full collection, and the beginner's guide covers how to start.
Common questions
Does grisaille have to be gray?
Strictly, yes. Monochrome work in brown is called brunaille and in green verdaille or terre verte underpainting, the last of which was traditionally used under skin tones. In practice most people use grisaille loosely for any single-color underpainting.
Can I do grisaille in acrylic?
Yes, and it is the easier medium to learn it in, because each layer dries in minutes. The one thing acrylic does less well is transparent glazing over the top, which needs a glazing medium rather than water. Watered-down acrylic goes chalky rather than transparent.
Should the underpainting be lighter or darker than the finished painting?
Lighter. Glazes only darken. Anything you paint at final value in the grisaille will end up too dark once the color goes on.
Why does my grisaille look muddy?
Usually too many nearly identical grays. Mix a small number of clearly separated values and use them decisively. Muddiness in monochrome is almost always indecision rather than a mixing fault.
Is grisaille the same as underpainting?
Not quite. All grisaille underpainting is underpainting, but underpainting can be done in any color, including a warm brown wash or a toned ground. Grisaille is the specific case where that first layer is a fully modeled gray image.
