GRISAILLES. – Grisaille denotes either a painting that imitates sculpture by employing only gray tones, or a preliminary sketch in which the white of the canvas serves as the light area and the shadows are rendered with a gray pigment.
Used especially in the decorative arts, grisaille painting is already frequently found in fifteenth-century manuscripts and in stained-glass windows; in particular, it was used to decorate furniture in the seventeenth century. The Dutchman E. de Witt was renowned in this artistic genre. The range of grays is naturally very broad, and one should not therefore suppose that grisailles are only in black and white, since they also make use of mixtures containing blue, pink, brown, and violet colors.