: What is W.-A. Bouguereau's work "licked finish" technically made of? I was reading about William-Adolphe Bouguereau(1825-1905), a French salon style adademic painter somewhat reviled by the (impressionist)

@Hamaas979

Apart from the relatively trivial bit — you know, putting the right colours in the right places in the right order and so forth, something almost anyone can do (that's sarcasm, by the way) — the technique is simple. Tedious, time-consuming and relatively expensive, but simple. It's just a matter of mechanical manipulation of the paint surface.

The traditional method involves pouncing the still-wet paint using a very soft brush. A quilled squirrel-hair mop would be typical for the period, but hake brushes would also be suitable, especially for small areas where a squirrel mop small enough to be useful wouldn't have enough strength to do the job. It's done with a very light tapping motion, both to avoid disturbing the colours that have already been established on the canvas, and to minimize paint loading on the mop. And you want to be working in relatively thin paint films; a heavy film with prominent brush strokes both takes a lot of squishing to lie flat and will quickly load the mop. Obviously, you need to have a lot of soft brushes handy, and will need to clean them often (and dry them before use, of course), since you can only work on smallish areas of relatively uniform colour with a single brush.

Like most things in traditional media, you can find a more complete description of the tools and techniques in Mayer's classic The Artist's Handbook of Materials and Techniques. (It's everywhere; as readily available as Itten or Sargent, which should be on every artist's or designer's bookshelf.)

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