Oil Painting

Oil paintings has a deep, rich look that comes from slow drying colors and the way artists can blend tones for hours. The medium lets painters build soft glows, sharp edges, or thick layers that almost stand off the canvas. This section shows artists working with oils to create scenes that feel warm, detailed and sometimes a bit dramatic, even if the brushwork looks simple at first glance. That slow drying time is part of why oil has stayed the go to medium for so many painters over the centuries, since it gives real room to rework a passage until it feels right. Explore this section for oil paintings ranging from tightly rendered realism to loose, expressive brushwork.

Françoise Nielly | Oil Painting

Françoise Nielly is a French painter known for electric, palette knife portraits built from thick oil and saturated color. Working from black and white photographs, she paints faces with a raw, confrontational energy that has carried her work across Europe, North America, and Asia.
Jules Breton | Oil Painting

Jules Breton was a French painter who turned the everyday work of gleaners and harvesters into some of the 19th century’s most admired rural scenes. Paintings like The Song of the Lark made him famous across France, England, and the United States, and his gentle vision of peasant life still shapes how we picture the…
Daniel Garber | Oil Painting

Daniel Garber was an American painter and a leading voice of Pennsylvania Impressionism, known for luminous scenes of Bucks County and the Delaware River. He often anchored his landscapes with a single graceful tree, and his decades of teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy shaped generations of younger painters.
Serge Marshennikov | Oil Painting

Serge Marshennikov is a Russian painter known for intimate, almost photographic portraits of women in quiet domestic rooms. Trained at the Repin Academy in St. Petersburg, he builds skin, hair, and fabric through patient layers of oil, giving each portrait a warmth that recalls Andrew Wyeth’s Helga paintings.
John William Waterhouse | Oil Painting

John William Waterhouse was a British painter who filled his canvases with myth, poetry, and tragic, romantic heroines. Best known for his multiple versions of The Lady of Shalott and Ophelia, he blended Pre-Raphaelite detail with classical storytelling across a long career at the Royal Academy.
Jack Sorenson | Oil Painting

Jack Sorenson paints the American West the way he actually lived it, having grown up driving stagecoaches and working as a gunfighter at Six Gun City in Texas. His warm, story filled scenes of cowboys and horses have appeared on magazine covers and in two published books over a career spanning four decades.
Pablo Solari | Oil Painting

Pablo Solari is an Argentine painter who taught himself by studying classical masters and muralists before developing his own bold, socially rooted style. His large, saturated canvases capture everyday Argentine life, from vineyards to city crowds, often with figures who avoid the viewer’s eye.
Ben Shahn | Oil Painting

Ben Shahn was a Lithuanian born American painter who became one of the strongest voices in Social Realism, using art to speak for workers and immigrants. His series on the Sacco and Vanzetti case made him a national figure, and he carried that same moral urgency through murals and paintings his whole career.
Victor Wang | Oil Painting

Victor Wang is a Chinese American painter whose portraits carry the weight of memory, migration, and a childhood shaped by the Cultural Revolution. He returns often to sunflowers, once a symbol of obedience in his youth, now a personal emblem, and he has spent decades teaching classical oil technique in St. Louis.
Bryan Mark Taylor | Oil Painting

Bryan Mark Taylor is an American landscape painter who mixes classical training with a restless love of travel, catching small, atmospheric moments wherever he goes. He also invented the STRADA easel, a tool now used by plein air painters around the world.
Laurent Parcelier | Oil Painting

Laurent Parcelier is a French painter whose sunlit scenes of Provence and the Luberon feel like an endless warm afternoon. He started his career drawing comics before turning fully to painting in 1996, developing a style built from tiny sparks of light and quiet, peaceful spaces.
Denis Sarazhin | Oil Painting

Denis Sarazhin is a Ukrainian painter known for dynamic figures caught in twisting poses, with expressive hands that carry as much emotion as the faces around them. Trained at the Kharkiv Art and Design Academy, he builds his scenes from everyday gestures and small, powerful observations.