The history of cave painting

The first ‘paintings’ were probably made in caves approximately 15,000 year ago.

Most of the cave painting that has been preserved seems to be attributed to the later millennia of the Upper Paleolithic.

These pictures of bison, deer, horses, cattle, mammoth and boars are located in the most remote recesses of the caves far from the inhabited, sunlit entrances.

For example, there was the 1991 discovery of the Grotte Cosquer near present-day Marseille, which contain the first decorated walls so far east in southern France.

The cave is now accessible only from the Mediterranean Sea to a few extraordinary skilled deep sea divers.

Archeologists speculate artists created the animals’ images to guarantee a successful hunt. Many are portrayed pierced with arrows, and gouges in the rock indicate cave-dwellers may have flung spears at the painted game.

Paleolithic art was discovered at the beginning of the second third of the 19th century, simultaneously at Geneva and in France.

The works discovered consisted of two harpoons decorated with geometric figures at Veyrier and a reindeer metapodial engraved with two hinds at Le Chaffaud.

To illuminate the surfaces while working, Paleolithic painters used stone lamps filled with marrow or fat, with a wick perhaps of moss.

For drawing, they used chunks of red and yellow ocher. For painting, they ground these same ochers into powders they mixed with water before applying.
The history of cave painting

History of painting

History of painting
The origin of painting is unknown. The first important records of this art are met with in Egypt; but before the Egyptian civilization the men of the early ages probably used color in ornamentation and decoration, and they certainly scratched the outlines of men and animals upon bone and slate.

Traces of this rude primitive work still remain to us on the pottery, weapons, and stone implements of the cave-dwellers.

But while indicating the awakening of intelligence in early man, they can be reckoned with as art only in a slight archeological way.

They show inclination rather than accomplishment—a wish to ornament or to represent, with only a crude knowledge of how to go about it.

The first aim of this primitive painting was undoubtedly decoration--the using of colored forms for color and form only, as shown in the pottery designs or cross-hatchings on stone knives or spear-heads. The second, and perhaps later aim, was by imitating the shapes and colors of men, animals, and the like, to convey an idea of the proportions and characters of such things.

An outline of a cave-bear or a mammoth was perhaps the cave-dweller's way of telling his fellows what monsters he had slain. We may assume that it was pictorial record, primitive picture-written history. This early method of conveying an idea is, in intent, substantially the same as the later hieroglyphic writing and historical painting of the Egyptians. The difference between them is merely one of development. Thus there is an indication in the art of Primitive Man of the two great departments of painting existent to-day.
History of painting