Bistre was the standard warm brown drawing ink of the Renaissance and Baroque periods — used by virtually every major master for pen and wash drawings. Rembrandt's extraordinary drawing technique, combining precise pen lines with broad wash areas, was executed almost exclusively in bistre and black iron gall ink.

Warm, smoky, and intimate. Bistre is the colour of candlelit drawings — it carries the warmth of the fire from which it literally comes. Associated with the private side of artistic practice: the drawing studies, notebooks, and compositional sketches that reveal the working mind of great artists.

The tradition of bistre drawing (pen and wash) represents some of the most intimate documents in art history — Rembrandt's hundreds of drawings in bistre and iron gall ink provide an unparalleled record of a great artist's visual thinking. The warm brown of bistre creates a sense of immediacy and warmth that the cooler iron gall ink lacks — drawings in bistre feel more like thoughts and less like finished works.