Posted August 20, 2025 by Artist Stephanie Hoover

(reissue of original post from March 2023)

There is a certain manufacturer of expensive oil pastels who includes on its product packaging some version of a very interesting (and marketable) story. In the late 1940s, the narrative goes, Pablo Picasso demanded that this paint supplier create for him a form of portable oil paint. Picasso being Picasso, of course, the manufacturer immediately set to work and, after more than a year of experimentation, created the oil pastels it still sells today.

It's obviously an entertaining tale, but there is one glaring problem: oil pastels had already existed for nearly 50 years by the time Picasso took his now-mythic stroll to that art shop.

French artist Jean-Francois Raffaelli (1850-1924) initially sought a career in the theater. His aspirations shifted to the art world a short time later and success was almost immediate. Claimed by both the Realists and the Impressionists, Raffaelli's reputation was nearly as strong in the U.S. as it was in his home country of France. Art collectors were fascinated with his humanist, gritty subject matter. His goal, he once said, was to paint "the beauty of Paris as well as it's wretchedness." Indeed, Raffaelli's preferred subject matter was not the glamor of the City of Lights, but rather the beauty and dignity of the mundane lives lived within it. Today Raffaelli is valued not only for his body of painted work, but also his prints, sculptures and invented art technologies. One of those innovations (and the subject of this article) was a product he called the "batonnet" - better known today as the oil pastel.

While there is no exact date for this invention, an early 20th century biography of Raffaelli (written in French) indicates that he made his first versions of oil pastels in the late 1800s. Numerous mentions of his oil pastels in art and photography magazines seemingly indicate that Raffaelli introduced them to commercial markets in or about 1903 - decades earlier than Picasso's supposed demand for the product. Responses from fellow artists (and even some art critics) were immediate and positive. Photographers were pleased to have yet another product capable of coloring black-and-white pictures.

In January 1903, an editorial in Current Literature magazine mentioned the "recent discovery" of Raffaelli's oil pastels and described them as "sticks of oil paint similar to crayons used in pastel, which give new and satisfactory results in the making of pictures." Unlike soft pastels (which this editor described as "easy to apply and easier to injure"), oil pastels were predicted to create something of "permanent value."

The American magazine Truth also regaled readers with the wonders of Raffaelli's oil pastels. In February 1903 its writers compared the excitement felt by artists for the new oil pastels to the joy felt by golfers over the invention of modern, sap-filled golf balls. (Previously, golfers used balls made of wood or even feathers.) "The fact that [oil pastels] can be used without brushes, palette, mediums, siccatives [i.e. drying agents], or any of the other messy accessories associated with oil painting will make them specially [sic] acceptable to painters who seek inspiration in the open air," Truth's Art Notes column noted.

As a seller of Raffaelli's new oil pastels, Holland Art Gallery on Grafton Street in London happily organized an exhibit of oil pastelists in January and/or February of 1903. The Magazine of Art described the showing as an effective demonstration of "the capabilities of M. Raffaelli's solid oil colours." Among the exhibitors were J. M. Swan, Mark Fisher, Alfred East, Nico Jungmann and Raffaelli himself.

Critics of the exhibit were quick (and correct) to point out that oil pastels did not, as Raffaelli proudly claimed, perfectly emulate oil paint. Most agreed, however, that certain oil pastel artists (including Raffaelli, of course) could indeed produce unique works of near quality - even without the "elasticity" provided by oil paint's higher oil content. Said the art writer of The Athenaeum magazine, the works of the artists in the new medium of oil pastel "are, if anything, more accomplished and more personal than the same artists' works in oil." This publication's art critic expressed one reservation, however, and it concerned the speed with which an artist could work in oil pastel as compared to oil paint. "The thought," he wrote, "of an Academy with eight thousand instead of two thousand pictures... is one to make the critic's heart sink."

Today oil pastels are manufactured in hundreds of colors, brands and collections. It occurs to me, though, that Raffaelli developed this medium for his own personal and artistic reasons and that their commercial popularity would be a secondary benefit. It was Raffaelli's artistic mission to remind his audience that "there is no beauty in nature; beauty resides in character." To that end, his subjects were often unvarnished, real and ever-so-human. Raffaelli's batonnet ultimately fulfilled his own desire for expediency; they allowed him to capture regular people surmounting regular challenges in the moment, while the scene existed, and before his memory of it faded.

Whatever his motivation, generations of artists past, present and future (including Pablo Picasso, I can only imagine) were, are and will be thankful for Raffaelli's invention of the oil pastel.