A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1054 entries
bistre
A warm transparent brown made from the soot of burned beechwood, boiled and settled and ground into a wash. It was the standard brown ink of European drawing for three centuries, and it has a particular quality: It goes on thin and honey-colored and builds without ever turning opaque, so a bistre wash holds light the way watercolor does.
Etymology
French bistre, and past that the dictionaries stop, which is unusual for a material this well documented — nobody has established where the French got it. Attempts to connect it to bis, meaning a dark greyish-brown, or to a Germanic word for soot, have not held up. The word arrives in English in the eighteenth century along with the pigment itself, and English kept the French spelling and lost the French pronunciation.
Notes
Rembrandt’s pen-and-wash drawings are largely bistre, as are Claude’s and Fragonard’s. It is not lightfast, which is why the sheets are shown under low light. Sepia, which people often conflate with it, is something else entirely — cuttlefish ink, and later than bistre by a century.