Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • In painting, executed with heavy blot-like touches.
  • noun A painting executed in this style.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective (Painting) Characterized by blots or heavy touches; coarsely depicted; wanting in delineation.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Characterized by blots or heavy touches; coarsely depicted; wanting in delineation.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • What Ruskin, the realist, in his "Modern Painters" describes as "blottesque" was at that time looked upon by both teachers and students as the one and only means by which white paper could be properly stained.

    Outdoor Sketching Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 Francis Hopkinson Smith 1876

  • My thanks are particularly due to my friend Miss Robbins, who has very kindly redrawn the occasionally rather blottesque figures of the first edition.

    Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata 1906

  • I think the reader would be amused if he could see the papers on my desk as I write all this, the mangled and disfigured pages, the experimental arrangements of notes, the sheets of suggestions balanced in constellations, the blottesque intellectual battlegrounds over which

    Tono Bungay 1906

Comments

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  • First used by John Ruskin to criticize modern painting.

    July 9, 2008

  • The painting begins as blottesque

    The genius is found in what's next:

    There's vigorous rubbing

    (A furious drubbing!)

    Et voilà! Un chef-d'oeuvre frottesque!

    June 8, 2016