Egyptians used colour, but not in the sense of the modern easel painter.
We are also informed, rather less than more reliably, that a gentleman
by the name of Apelles, in the days of Phidias, painted still-lifes so
naturally that birds were tempted to peck at them, and we know much more
accurately of the many delightful bits of wall-painting the rich man of
Pompeii and Herculaneum used to have put on his walls, but the easel
painting is a creation of modern times.

The sole reason for this can hardly be explained better than by pointing
out the long-standing lack of a suitable medium which would permit the
making of finer paintings, other than wall and decorative paintings. The
old tempera medium was hardly suited to finer work, since it was a
makeshift of very inadequate working qualities. Briefly, the method
consisted of mixing any pigment or paint in powder form with any
suitable sticky substance which would make it adhere to a surface.
Sticky substances frequently used were the tree gums collected from
certain fruit-trees, including the fig and the cherry. This crude method
is known by the word "tempera," which comes from the Latin "temperare,"
to modify or mix, and denotes merely any alteration of the original
pigment. Tempera painting, as the only technique known, was really a
great blessing to the world, since it prevented the wholesale production
in a short time of such vast quantities of pictures as the world
nowadays is asked to enjoy. I am not so sure that the two brothers, the
Flemish painters Hubert and Jan van Eyck, who are said to have given us
the modern oil method, are really so much deserving of praise, since
their improved method of painting with oils caused a production of
paintings half of which might much better have remained unpainted. The
one thing that can be said of all paintings made before their day is
that they were painted for a practical purpose. They had to fit into
certain physical conditions, architectural or other. Most modern