Dating a painting: the ten-second routine

Everything in this track has been building towards one skill: being shown a painting you have never seen and placing it. What follows is the routine itself — the order in which to ask the questions, because the order matters. Start with the physical facts, which cannot lie, and only then move to style and subject, which can.

1. The support

The support is what the paint sits on. It is the first thing to read because it changes slowly and for practical reasons rather than fashionable ones.

Wooden panel dominates until the sixteenth century: poplar in Italy, oak in the Netherlands and Germany. Panels warp convexly with age, so an old panel painting tends to bow slightly towards you, and large ones show vertical joins where boards were glued together. Canvas takes over through the sixteenth century — Venice led, because damp made panels misbehave — since it is lighter, cheaper, can be made enormous, and can be rolled and shipped. By 1600 canvas is the default almost everywhere.

That gives a crude but strong first cut: panel points before about 1550 in Italy and before about 1600 in the north. Two cautions. Small board or panel returns in the nineteenth century for oil sketches made outdoors, where a rigid surface is convenient, and the Pre-Raphaelites revived panel deliberately. And copper panels are a speciality of small, jewel-like cabinet pictures around 1600.

2. The ground

The ground is the prepared layer between support and paint, and its colour sets the key of the whole picture, because it shows through thin passages and in the gaps between strokes.

Fifteenth-century panels get brilliant white gesso, which is why early Netherlandish and Italian pictures glow from within. From the later sixteenth century painters move to warm brown, red-brown or grey grounds, partly to save time: the mid-tone is already there and you paint up to light and down to dark. This is the technical reason Baroque paintings look dark, and why many have darkened further, since a brown ground becomes more dominant as the paint above it grows transparent with age. Pale grounds come back with the Impressionists, who wanted maximum luminosity — one of the reasons their canvases look so different from anything before them.

3. The palette

Pigments give the hardest evidence available, because a pigment that did not exist cannot be in a picture. This yields a terminus post quem: the earliest possible date.

Prussian blue: from about 1706. Its presence rules out the seventeenth century.
Synthetic ultramarine: 1826. Before that, ultramarine came from lapis lazuli and cost more than gold, so it was reserved for the Virgin’s robe and used sparingly.
Viridian, the cadmiums, cobalt violet: 1820s to 1860s.
Titanium white: commercially from the 1920s.
Acrylic paint: from the 1950s, with a characteristically flat, plastic, unyellowed surface.

So a canvas of broken, high-key colour with violet shadows cannot predate the 1830s, whatever else it looks like. The collapsible metal tube, patented in 1841, is part of the same story: it made painting away from the studio practical, which is why finished-looking pictures of outdoor light become common only afterwards.

4. Brushwork and edges

Now the handling. The rough sequence runs: invisible and enamel-smooth in early oil and tempera; blended but with loaded highlights in the High Renaissance; openly visible and bravura from late Titian through Hals, Velázquez and Rembrandt; smoothed away again by Neoclassical and academic painters after 1760, who thought visible facture vulgar; then defiantly visible from the Impressionists on, until with Van Gogh the mark itself becomes the subject.

Edges matter as much as strokes. Wiry, uniformly hard edges belong to tempera, to early Netherlandish oil, and to later linear traditions — Neoclassicism, the Pre-Raphaelites. Softened, smoky transitions are sfumato, from Leonardo onwards. Edges that dissolve, with colour from one form bleeding into its neighbour, mean Impressionism and after.

5. Space

Ask how the picture organises depth. A gold ground, figures sized by importance rather than distance, and no consistent recession put you before about 1420. Single-point linear perspective, worked out in Florence in the 1420s and written up by Alberti in 1435, brings tiled floors, coffered ceilings and orthogonals converging on one vanishing point — the loudest Renaissance tell there is. Baroque space then goes diagonal and theatrical, driving the eye into depth on a slant. Then, from the 1860s, space deliberately flattens again under Japanese influence: high viewpoints, cropped foregrounds, no vanishing point.

6. Subject and patron

Ask who paid, and where it hung. An altarpiece with ranks of saints and a kneeling donor means church patronage, so pre-Reformation, or Catholic Europe after Trent. A small picture of a tavern, a maid or a breakfast table means the open market of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, where there were no church commissions to be had. A full-length aristocrat in a landscape park means eighteenth-century Britain. Peasants treated with the scale and gravity previously reserved for history painting means French Realism after 1848. Subject narrows geography as much as date.

7. Format and frame

A pointed top, gilding, or a work made of hinged panels means an altarpiece, so early. The tondo, a round picture, is a Florentine domestic fashion of roughly 1450–1520. Tall narrow panels in decorative pairs suggest Rococo overdoors. Frames are unreliable — pictures are reframed constantly — but an engaged frame, carved from the same plank as the panel, is a genuinely early feature. And a very large canvas with no frame at all means post-1947 New York.

8. Signature

Trust this least. Medieval and early Renaissance works are frequently unsigned, or signed in Latin on a painted cartellino, a trompe-l’oeil scrap of paper within the scene. Northern painters sometimes hid signatures on objects in the picture. Routine signature-and-date in a corner becomes normal only from the seventeenth century. A signature is the easiest thing on a painting to add later, and a workshop picture could carry the master’s name perfectly honestly.

The traps

Revivals. A Gothic Revival church is not Gothic; a Neoclassical canvas is not antique; a nineteenth-century academic pastiche is not Renaissance. Revivals betray themselves by being too pure: no real period is stylistically consistent, because real buildings and pictures accumulate accidents and alterations. Add machine regularity, industrial materials, modern pigments and unmistakably contemporary faces, and the disguise fails.

Regional lag. Styles radiate from centres. A provincial workshop can look a generation behind a metropolitan one of the same year, and Renaissance conventions reach parts of northern Europe decades after Florence. If a picture looks old-fashioned but the materials do not, widen the range forwards rather than pushing the date back.

The long career. Titian in 1515 is crisp and Bellinesque; Titian in 1575 is broken to the edge of abstraction. Turner ends in near-dissolved light. Picasso runs Blue, Rose, Cubist, Neoclassical and Surrealist phases. Kandinsky is stormy in 1912 and ruled geometry by 1926. The name does not fix the date — so date the picture, then reconcile it with the artist’s phases, never the other way round.

How to spot it in ten seconds

Panel or canvas? Panel pushes you before 1600; canvas after. Board could be a nineteenth-century sketch.
What colour is the ground? Bright white means early or Impressionist; warm brown means roughly 1580–1800.
Is any pigment impossible? Prussian blue means after 1706; a high-key violet-and-orange palette means after about 1830.
Can you see the brush? Hidden means early oil or academic; bravura means Baroque; insistent and broken means after 1870.
How are the edges? Wiry, smoky or dissolved — three different centuries.
Where do the orthogonals go? No recession means pre-1420; one vanishing point means Renaissance; flattened and cropped means after 1860.
Who commissioned it? Altar, market stall, country house or political statement.
What shape is it, and how big? Pointed and gilded, round, or larger than a person and unframed.
Only now look at the signature, and treat it as a hypothesis rather than an answer.
Run the trap check. Too pure for its supposed period means a revival; slightly behind the times means provincial; wildly unlike the artist’s famous manner means a different decade of a long life.