The Other Waters: A Field Guide to the World's Great Water-Based Media
Gouache, egg tempera, sumi-e, and the illuminated arts — the magnificent family of media that watercolor tends to overshadow, and why that needs to change
Think of watercolor as the famous sibling — the one who gets the biographies, the dedicated museum wings, the magazine retrospectives. The other water-based media are the rest of the family: just as gifted, often more ancient, occasionally more demanding, and almost universally underappreciated by anyone who hasn't encountered them up close.
This is an attempt to remedy that.
The story of water-based media is not a subsidiary story. It encompasses the illuminated books of medieval Europe, the sacred icons of Byzantium, the literati scrolls of the Tang dynasty, the Mughal court paintings that made European visitors reach for superlatives, and the late-career reinvention of one of the 20th century's greatest painters — a man who, unable to hold a brush, picked up a pair of scissors instead and made his most radical work. It runs from cave walls to Matisse's bedroom in Nice, from Botticelli's preparatory panels to Andrew Wyeth's Pennsylvania winter fields. It is, in other words, most of the history of painting before oil took over.
Water never stopped being interesting. It simply got overshadowed.
Gouache: The Medium That Made the Modern World Look the Way It Does
Begin with the medium you almost certainly know — or think you know. Gouache is opaque watercolor: the same pigment-in-water-and-gum-arabic chemistry, but with chalk or blanc fixe added to the mixture, giving it body, covering power, and that distinctive matte, velvety surface that distinguishes it from the transparent wash.
The word comes from the Italian guazzo, meaning a muddy pool or puddle. This is not a flattering etymology for a medium of considerable nobility, and the name has done the medium no favors. Neither has its long career as the workhorse of commercial illustration — by the mid-20th century, gouache was what the Disney studios used for animation backgrounds, what advertising agencies used for mock-ups, what magazine illustrators used to meet their deadlines. The association with commercial pragmatism proved sticky.
And yet the medium's actual history begins not with advertising but with illuminated manuscripts — with monks in cold scriptoria laboriously painting the pages of sacred texts with brilliant, flat, opaque colors that would hold their luminosity on vellum in perpetuity. The opaque properties of gouache made it ideal for building up color on a surface that absorbed transparent washes unpredictably. Those medieval illuminations — the Book of Kells, the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, the Winchester Bible — are among the most meticulous and beautiful objects ever made, and they are largely made in what we now call gouache.
The Persian and Mughal miniature traditions took the medium to its absolute technical zenith. Court painters in the Mughal workshops under Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan in the 16th and 17th centuries used opaque water-based paints to produce images of such refined detail — individual hairs on a bird, the texture of a specific silk, the architecture of a distant city — that European visitors assumed the works must have been aided by instruments they couldn't identify. They were made with brushes of astonishing fineness, by painters who spent decades mastering a single aspect of the tradition. The Metropolitan Museum's collection of Mughal miniatures remains one of the most quietly overwhelming experiences available to the art traveler in New York.
Dürer used gouache-like body color in his nature studies — the famous Young Hare combines watercolor and bodycolour in a way that makes the distinctions academic. Turner used it to suggest fog. By the 18th century it had entered the vocabulary of the French court, where François Boucher used its pearly, pastel tones for decorative mythologies of considerable charm.
Then came Matisse, and everything changed.
Matisse's Scissors
In January 1941, Henri Matisse underwent two surgeries on his intestinal tract. The operations were successful; the complications were nearly fatal. Left in intense, near-constant pain, confined to a wheelchair and then a bed, the greatest colorist of the 20th century found himself unable to paint.
What happened next belongs in any account of creative resilience that takes painting seriously. At nearly eighty years old, Matisse reinvented himself through the medium of the cut-out gouache, which he elevated into an autonomous visual language, free and capable of reaching the universal through its simplicity. He had his assistants paint large sheets of paper with flat, brilliant gouache in pure colors — exactly the matte, opaque, non-reflective surface that gouache produces, no other medium would do — and then he cut directly into the color with scissors. He called it drawing with scissors. The gesture was immediate, physical, irreversible in the way that the best watercolor washes are irreversible — a commitment made in real time, without the option of revision.
The results were Jazz (1947) — a livre d'artiste of twenty prints based on his cut-outs, with accompanying text in Matisse's looping calligraphy, ranging in subject from circus performers to a quietly terrifying red-eyed wolf that evokes the menace of occupied France — and then a cascade of increasingly monumental works: The Snail, La Négresse, the vast blue swimming figures, and eventually the entire interior decoration of the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence, for which the cut-out method informed the stained glass designs.
Matisse himself said of this late period: "I have needed all that time to reach the stage where I can say what I want to say. Only what I created after the illness constitutes my real self: free, liberated."
The medium he chose for this liberation was gouache. Applied flatly by his assistants, cut with scissors, assembled on walls under his direction from a wheelchair, the gouaches découpées represent the full color range and compositional ambition of a painter's career distilled to its essence. They are among the most joyful images the 20th century produced — all the more so when you understand the circumstances under which they were made.
You can see the cut-outs at the Tate Modern in London, MoMA in New York, and the Musée Matisse in Nice. The Musée Matisse, occupying a 17th-century villa in Nice surrounded by olive trees, is the most intimate of the three — the one where the medium's human scale, its warmth, its handmade confidence, comes through most directly.
Egg Tempera: The Medium That Outlasted Its Obituary
Oil paint was supposed to kill egg tempera. The Flemish masters — Van Eyck, Memling, the workshop tradition of the North — perfected the oil binder in the 15th century, and within a generation the slow, demanding, irreversible technique of grinding dry pigment into egg yolk was essentially abandoned. For three centuries it remained a historical curiosity, consulted in craft manuals and practiced by nobody of consequence.
The obituary was premature.
Egg tempera's claim on the serious painter's attention is this: it does things nothing else does. Egg yolk is an emulsion — neither purely water-based nor purely oil-based, but somewhere between, a natural medium of extraordinary complexity that dries not by evaporation but by oxidation, forming a film of remarkable durability and translucency. The paintings it produces have a distinctive inner luminosity — colors seem to glow from within rather than from the surface — and an enamel-like hardness that has preserved works painted five centuries ago with an integrity that would make any oil painter envious.
The technique demands an almost architectural approach. Egg tempera cannot be blended wet-into-wet; it dries within minutes of application. Instead, painters build form through a system of small, hatched brushstrokes — each one a separate layer, each layer subtly modifying the one beneath. Working in this way across weeks and months on a prepared gesso panel produces a surface that accumulates light in a way that is, in the best examples, unlike anything else in painting.
The medium's great revival began with the Pre-Raphaelites in the 19th century and was consolidated by the founding of the Society of Tempera Painters in London in 1901 — five artists who had read English translations of Cennino Cennini's 14th-century craft manual Il Libro dell'Arte and decided to actually follow the instructions. The results were revelatory.
The American revival came through a more personal transmission. Andrew Wyeth learned egg tempera from his brother-in-law, Peter Hurd, who had himself absorbed it from the painter N.C. Wyeth's circle. In 1938, the two attended a demonstration of tempera painting in the Early Renaissance manner given by Daniel V. Thompson at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Wyeth was transfixed. He said of the medium, in a comparison that speaks to a particular sensibility: "Oil is hot and fiery, almost like a summer night, where tempera is a cool breeze, dry, crackling like winter branches blowing in the wind. I'm a dry person, really. I'm not a juicy painter. There's no fight in oil. It doesn't have the austere in it. The difference is like the difference between Beethoven and Bach."
Christina's World (1948) — probably the most reproduced American painting of the 20th century, the image of a woman in a pink dress pulling herself across a summer field toward a distant farmhouse — is egg tempera on gesso panel. The extraordinary detail of the dry grass, the specific character of the light, the crystalline hardness of the surface that makes the image feel simultaneously immediate and remote — none of this would be possible in any other medium. The painting is at MoMA, where it is impossible to see in peace because everyone in the building is looking at it.
What is less often known is that Wyeth regarded his watercolors as the preparation for his temperas — the quick, open, risk-taking studies that accumulated the visual intelligence he then spent months distilling into the controlled hatching of the panel paintings. To understand one half of his practice, you need to see the other.
The Brandywine Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania holds the deepest public collection of Wyeth egg temperas in the world, in a building that sits in the landscape he painted. Going there is, among all the destinations in this field, possibly the most complete single-site experience available to the serious traveler.
The Four Treasures: Chinese Ink and the Oldest Living Tradition
The ink brush tradition of China is the longest continuous painting practice in the history of art. It is also, in the estimation of scholars from outside the tradition, the least understood by Western audiences — which is itself a kind of statement about the assumptions Western art history has made about what counts as significant.
The Four Treasures of the Study — brush, ink, paper, and inkstone — are the instruments through which Chinese literati painters expressed not just observations but states of mind, moral character, and philosophical positions. An ink stick is made from compressed soot, bound with animal glue, and dried over months or years; it is then ground against the inkstone with water until the correct consistency is achieved. The act of grinding ink is itself considered a form of meditation, a preparation of both the material and the painter. What is produced from this process — an ink that can range from deep black through every gradation of gray to the palest imaginable wash — is among the most responsive, most expressive materials in the history of painting.
The Tang Dynasty poet and painter Wang Wei is credited with inventing the monochrome ink landscape in the 8th century — the discovery, revolutionary for its time, that a range of ink tones alone could convey depth, atmosphere, and the essence of natural forms without recourse to color. Su Shi, the great Song Dynasty poet-critic, wrote of Wang Wei's paintings: "In every poem by Wang Wei, there is a painting; and in every one of his paintings, there is a poem." That integration of literary sensibility with visual practice — the idea that a painting might be read as a poem is read, for its intellectual and spiritual content as much as its visual beauty — is the philosophical foundation of the entire tradition.
The Song Dynasty (960-1279) brought the tradition to its first great flowering, with landscape painters whose images of mountains, water, and mist remain among the most sophisticated landscape art ever made. The literati ideal — that painting should express the inner life of the educated scholar rather than please a court or deceive the eye — gave Chinese ink painting a conceptual seriousness that Western painting would not begin to approach until Romanticism, some eight centuries later.
For the Western traveler, the great public collections are at the National Palace Museum in Taipei (housing the imperial collection carried to Taiwan in 1949, arguably the finest repository of Chinese painting anywhere), the Palace Museum in Beijing, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, whose Asian art galleries include significant holdings of both Chinese and Japanese ink painting.
Sumi-e: When Ink Became Zen
Japan received ink painting from China via Zen Buddhism, and did something with it that China had not quite done: it made the act of painting inseparable from the act of practice. Sumi-e — literally ink painting — arrived in Japan in the 14th century carried by Zen monks, and for a long time the two traditions were practically indistinguishable. Zen painting (zenga) and ink painting were the same thing, pursued in the same spirit, toward the same end.
The medium's great Japanese master is Sesshū Tōyō, a Zen monk born in 1420 who traveled to China to study the technique at its source, absorbed what the Chinese masters had to offer, and returned to Japan to create something distinctively his own. Where Chinese landscape painting tended toward the vast and the distant, Sesshū's work is more compressed, more expressive, more immediately physical in its brushwork — the marks less descriptive and more enacted. His landscapes feel like they were made in a single, decisive session, even when evidence suggests otherwise. The Tokyo National Museum holds the most significant collection of his surviving work.
What makes sumi-e philosophically distinctive — and what makes it genuinely difficult to explain to a Western audience raised on the assumption that mastery means maximum control — is its relationship to spontaneity. The training required is immense: years of practicing basic brushstrokes, studying calligraphy, learning to hold and move the brush in ways that have no equivalent in Western technique. But the goal of all this training is not the ability to produce any effect at will. It is the ability to act without hesitation — to make a mark that is not deliberated, not corrected, not composed in the Western sense but expressed in a single committed gesture. The white of the paper is as deliberate as the ink. Emptiness is not absence; it is presence of a different kind.
The Zen master Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1769) represents the tradition's most extreme expression — paintings and calligraphic works of almost violent urgency, made in the belief that the brushstroke was itself a form of spiritual transmission. His self-portraits, made in old age with gestures so bold they border on abstraction, are among the most confrontational images in Japanese art. They are also, for Western viewers with eyes tuned to the Abstract Expressionism of the mid-20th century, eerily familiar — which raises interesting questions about the direction of influence.
Persian and Mughal Miniatures: The Supreme Achievement of Opaque Water-Based Paint
No survey of water-based media is complete without the tradition that took opaque water-based paint furthest — the Persian miniature and its culmination in the Mughal court workshops of 16th and 17th-century India.
These are paintings of almost impossible refinement. A Mughal miniature from the Akbarnama or the Padshahnama — the illustrated chronicles of the Mughal emperors — might depict a battle, a court scene, or a single portrait with a level of detail that requires a magnifying glass to fully read. Individual feathers on a hoopoe bird. The weave of a specific textile. The grain of marble. All of this achieved with pure opaque pigments on sized paper, using brushes sometimes made from a single squirrel hair.
The medium required — called naqsh or simply body color in the manuscripts — is functionally identical to what European painters call gouache: opaque water-based paint applied in fine, controlled strokes to a highly prepared surface. The difference is the tradition and intention behind it. Where European gouache tended toward illustration and decoration, the Mughal painters were creating state documents of symbolic as well as aesthetic significance — images of imperial power encoded with specific iconographic meaning, made to be held in the hand and studied in private.
The greatest collections are at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin (which holds one of the finest collections of Islamic and Mughal manuscripts outside South Asia), the British Library in London, the Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington DC, and the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto.
What These Media Share — And What They Don't
Put all these traditions in a room and the differences are immediately apparent. Gouache is confident, flat, matte — a medium of decision rather than suggestion. Egg tempera is precise, luminous, slow — a medium of accumulated intelligence. Chinese ink is tonal, gestural, philosophical — a medium of essence rather than description. Sumi-e is committed, spontaneous, spatial — a medium of presence in the Buddhist sense. Persian miniature is meticulous, hierarchical, symbolic — a medium of royal statement made intimate.
What they share is water. And with water comes the fundamental condition that all of them impose: you cannot unknow what you know. Every mark is a decision. Every decision is final. The white of the paper or the prepared gesso ground is the light, and once you cover it you cannot get it back.
This is also, for any reader who has spent time with oil painting's capacity for revision and reworking, what makes all of these traditions so interesting to look at. You are seeing the painter's first thought, or what has been trained and practiced and internalized until it feels like a first thought. You are watching a mind at work in real time, with no safety net.
There is a moment in Japanese calligraphy instruction when the teacher tells the student: The brush knows. After years of practice, the hand has learned what the mind still has to think about. The brushstroke arrives before the decision to make it.
That is the ideal toward which all of these water-based traditions tend, in their different ways, from different starting points. The medium is not oil. There is no blending, no scraping, no second chance. There is only the moment of commitment, and what it reveals about the person who made it.
Where to See Them
For gouache — Matisse specifically: The Musée Matisse in Nice holds the most intimate collection of his work, including cut-outs in a domestic scale that the larger institutions can't match. The Tate Modern in London and MoMA in New York both hold major cut-out works. The Art Institute of Chicago holds Jazz in its entirety — all twenty prints, rarely displayed complete — and when it is on view, it is one of the most viscerally colorful experiences in American museums.
For egg tempera: The Brandywine Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, is the essential destination for Wyeth. The National Gallery in London holds the greatest concentration of early Italian and Flemish tempera panels in the English-speaking world — Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, Carlo Crivelli — and seeing them in person clarifies what the medium does that oil never quite replicated.
For Chinese ink painting: The National Palace Museum in Taipei is, for the serious traveler, worth a dedicated trip — the collection is simply unmatched. In New York, the Metropolitan Museum's Asian galleries repay regular visits. The Freer Gallery of Art in Washington DC holds exceptional Chinese and Japanese ink works in a building whose Whistler Peacock Room provides a memorable footnote to the tradition's Western encounters.
For Japanese sumi-e: The Tokyo National Museum in Ueno holds the central collection of Sesshū and subsequent masters. The Kyoto National Museum holds major works from the Muromachi period. For Zen painting specifically, the Eisei-Bunko Museum in Tokyo holds works by Hakuin and his circle. Any serious trip to Japan that includes more than tourist temple-spotting should allocate time to at least one of these.
For Mughal and Persian miniatures: The Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, housed in the grounds of Dublin Castle, is one of the world's great under-visited cultural resources — a collection of Islamic, South Asian, East Asian, and European manuscripts of extraordinary quality, displayed with exemplary intelligence. The British Library's Sir John Ritblat Gallery in London displays rotating selections of its manuscript holdings, including Mughal material of the highest order. The Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington DC, part of the Smithsonian, constitute the premier American collection of Islamic and Asian art.
The Question This Raises
A reader who has arrived at the end of this survey, and the end of the previous one on watercolor, might reasonably ask: why does Western art history treat oil painting as the default, the standard against which these other traditions are measured?
The honest answer is that it doesn't have to. The hierarchy is a historical accident of the 15th century, when Flemish painters found a technique that allowed for greater illusionism, longer working time, and the ability to paint on portable canvas rather than fixed walls or panels. These were practical advantages that made oil paint the dominant medium of the European fine art tradition. But they were not aesthetic advantages. They were not evidence of greater expressive power. They were simply more convenient for certain kinds of painting.
The water-based traditions covered in these pages preceded oil by centuries in some cases and millennia in others. They have never been abandoned. They continue to be practiced by artists of serious ambition. And they offer things oil cannot: the luminosity of egg tempera, the flat declarative confidence of gouache, the philosophical depth of the ink tradition, the impossible refinement of the miniature schools.
The medium is not the message, exactly. But the medium is never neutral. Every one of these traditions makes specific demands on the painter's attention, specific demands on the viewer's. Learning to look at them — really look, with the same patience and receptivity that the great works deserve — is not a minor exercise in connoisseurship.
It is, in the end, the same invitation that all serious art extends. Pay attention. Look longer than feels comfortable. The thing you almost missed is usually the thing that matters.
Essential collections: Musée Matisse, Nice (gouache cut-outs); Brandywine Museum of Art, Chadds Ford PA (Wyeth egg tempera); National Gallery, London (Early Italian and Flemish tempera); National Palace Museum, Taipei (Chinese ink); Tokyo National Museum (Japanese sumi-e); Chester Beatty Library, Dublin (Persian and Mughal miniature); Freer Gallery of Art, Washington DC (Asian ink and Islamic manuscript). All repay more than one visit.