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.

Adel Elliethy | Oil Painting

Adel Elliethy is a self-taught Egyptian portrait painter born in 1988 in Giza, who studied business administration but never gave up the art he began as a child drawing Disney characters. Working in oil with warm colors and soft brushwork, he paints ordinary Egyptians, people from the streets, villages, and the Nile, capturing their quiet…
The Battle of Waterloo | Oil Painting

This dramatic depiction of the Battle of Waterloo captures the moment on June 18, 1815, when Napoleon’s army was finally crushed by the combined forces of the Duke of Wellington and Prussian commander Gebhard von Blücher. The defeat ended Napoleon’s Hundred Days return from exile and closed the door on his rule as Emperor of…
Mohamed Khedr | Oil Painting

Mohamed Khedr is an Egyptian painter born in 1970 who graduated from Helwan University’s Faculty of Fine Arts and later earned a diploma in folk art from the Arts Academy in Cairo. His realist and impressionist paintings capture everyday life in Cairo along with Egyptian singers, thinkers, and cultural heroes. He has exhibited across Egypt…
James Ensor | Oil Painting

James Ensor was a Belgian painter born in Ostend in 1860, now seen as a key forerunner of Expressionism and Surrealism. After early realist works, he turned in the mid-1880s toward carnival masks, skeletons, and grotesque crowds, using harsh colors and jagged brushwork to mock the vanity and pettiness he saw in people. His huge…
Lucian Freud Nude Paintings | Oil Painting

Lucian Freud, grandson of Sigmund Freud, spent his career in London painting nudes that refused to flatter anyone, favoring friends, lovers, and family caught in unposed, unglamorous moments. His thick, built-up brushwork gave flesh a raw, bruised weight rarely seen in traditional nude painting, making his sitters feel uncomfortably present rather than idealized. He died…
The Starry Night – Vincent van Gogh | Oil Painting

“The Starry Night” is one of Vincent van Gogh’s most famous paintings, made in 1889 while he was staying at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France. Its swirling sky, glowing village, and dark cypress tree blend real memories of his window view with imagination, reflecting the restless emotion that defined much of his late work.…
Rosmery Mamani Ventura | Oil Painting

Rosmery Mamani Ventura is a young Bolivian pastel artist who left her rural Aymara community at 14 to work as a maid in El Alto, an experience that later shaped the compassionate portraits she is known for today. She draws the elderly, children, and people living on the margins of city life, seeing her own…
Nick Alm | Oil Painting

Nick Alm is a Swedish realist painter born in 1985 in Eksjö, who trained at the Florence Academy of Art before studying further with Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum. Working directly from life rather than photographs, he paints the human figure with careful attention to light and atmosphere, aiming to capture something universally human rather than…
Sharon Sprung | Oil Painting

Sharon Sprung is an American painter who builds her oil paintings slowly through layered, deliberate brushwork, blending realism with patterned abstraction to search for the human condition in each figure. Trained at the Art Students League, the National Academy of Design, and Cornell University, she draws on influences like Caravaggio, Velázquez, and Käthe Kollwitz. Her…
Tamara De Lempicka | Oil Painting

Tamara de Lempicka was a Polish-born Art Deco painter, born Maria Górska in Warsaw in 1898, who built her signature style of sleek, sculptural portraits after settling in Paris in the 1920s. Known as “The Baroness with a Brush,” she painted aristocrats, celebrities, and nudes with sharp precision, blending late Cubism with a polished neoclassical…