Stained Glass Effect

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The look borrows from the church window: heavy dark lines divide a picture into compartments of bright, even colour, so the outlines give structure while the colour seems to glow. Georges Rouault, who as a youth was apprenticed to a maker and restorer of stained glass, painted clowns, judges and religious figures from the early 1900s with thick black contours and jewel-like colour.

French painters had already moved in this direction. Working at Pont-Aven in Brittany in 1888, Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin used strong outlines and flat colour in works such as Gauguin's Vision after the Sermon (1888), an approach the critic Édouard Dujardin named Cloisonnism. Fernand Léger's black-outlined figures of the mid-20th century kept the link alive, and Léger also designed windows for churches. In Quebec, Marcelle Ferron made walls of vivid coloured glass from the 1960s. Look for dark borders that separate colours rather than shade them.