Word: bitumen
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...great wave of romanticism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, some painters became so absorbed in expression that they lost sight of the limitations of their materials. Ralph Albert Blakelock, the American romantic landscapist (1847-1919), delighted in the rich gloss of bitumen, a poor-drying, brown pigment, which he used so excessively that the paint ultimately slipped on the canvas (e.g., in one of his landscapes owned by the Brooklyn Museum, paint ran down and over the frame). Edgar Degas, the French impressionist, striving for certain effects, sometimes reduced his paint to what he called essence by thinning...
Iraq's oil is a big IF. The oil is there, all right, and has been since recorded history. Noah caulked his Ark "within and without with pitch" taken from bitumen springs in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley. Just a few hundred yards from where Nebuchadnezzar, "full of fury," cast Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego into the fiery, oil-fed furnace, Iraq Petroleum (then called Turkish Petroleum) in 1927 blew in its first well with a gush that could not be controlled for three days. Iraq's proven reserve (7.5 billion barrels in the Kirkuk field alone) is within...
Most interesting find at Hassuna was a sickle made of flint chips set in bitumen, and still sharp enough to cut grain. It proved that the ancient inhabitants were not mere hunting savages. They had passed the most important milestone on the road toward civilization: sowing and reaping crops...
...paradox, however, that Duveneck's paintings seem more native to the "brown decades" in the U.S. than the paintings of some fo his stay-at-home contemporaries. he loved the brown pigment, bitumen, and it not only dulled his canvases but cracked extensively after a few years. His magnificently drawn and sometimes vivid portraits have the air of life in a darkened parlor, not the sunny tavern-and-haystack life which Duveneck and his pupils actually led. Artist Duveneck entered parlor society briefly in 1886 through his marriage to Elizabeth Boott, a refined Bostonian traveler straight out of Henry...
This period has seen no painter with such a brave conceit. Some critics have thought that John Singer Sargent might have had it, but evidently he did not, for his paintings have begun to decay. Not noticeablyless. Sargent had a way of using bitumen and laying thin pigments on heavier ones; he painted as carelessly as if his masterpieces were no more than the facile originals for magazine covers or cigaret advertisements...