280 PAINTING MATERIALS

of miniver, or ermine, and some of the quality of the brush must have been lost
by the trimming that he suggests, with scissors (Thompson, pp. 40-41). The
regular brush for modern oil painting, because it is stiff enough to draw out a
fairly heavy and paste-like mixture, is made of hog hair, usually bleached white.

In the Far East, brushes are commonly mounted in bamboo and have some-
what more specialized selection according to use than is common in the West. The
hairs of deer and wolf will be combined, for example, into a brush for certain kinds

3 d

FIGURE 2. A few of the Chinese brushes described and illustrated by Sickman: (a) a
small brush of deer hair made for drawing and having two reducing collars, the smaller
one a silver tube; (b) a plain, pointed brush of pure goat hair with the usual bamboo
handle; (c) a goat hair brush set in an enlarging holder of ivory attached to a handle of
bamboo which carries a loop for hanging—a brush for large ink painting or for inscrip-
tions; (d) a brush of chicken feathers pressed open; (<?) a stub brush with an enlarging
holder of horn; (f) a wide, flat brush set in a brass frame or ferrule attached to a bamboo
handle—used for removing charcoal or powder.
of writing and painting. A particular brush of deer hair is made for marking such
details as the veins of a leaf. A brush for inscriptions is made of two parts rabbit
and eight parts goat hair. With a few exceptions, these are pointed in shape.
The soft or fine brush used by western painters is ordinarily pointed, except for
a few that have blunt ends and for such special brushes as dabbers, stripers, mops,
fans, and wash brushes. Shapes of the bristle brushes, however, have a large
number and variety. The ferrule in which the hairs are mounted may be round in
section, slightly flattened, or very flat and thin. The flat brush is probably the
more usual in the modern practice of oil painting. The shapes of the ends and the
differences in the length of the hair make up a various range of brushes that are