pen

pen. Writing and drawing instrument used with ink or a similar coloured fluid. From Early Christian times until the 19th century the standard form of pen in Europe was the quill, made from bird feathers, and most of the pen drawings of the Old Masters were done with such instruments. Goose, swan, and turkey quills have commonly been used for writing and crow quills provide a very fine point for drawing. The reed pen, made from stems of bamboo-like grasses, was already in use in classical antiquity and is probably older than the quill. The point is much coarser, producing a bold, thick line, sometimes slightly blurred at the edges. For drawing it has been used much less than the quill, though Rembrandt, for example, was a master of the broad energetic technique appropriate to it. The metal pen dates back at least to Roman times, but steel nibs of the modern type were not made until late in the 18th century and began to replace the quill only after machine methods of producing them were developed in the 1820s. More recent developments include the fountain pen (the first efficient model was patented by the American inventor L. E. Waterman in 1884), the ballpoint (the first satisfactory model was developed in the 1930s by Laśzló Biró, a Hungarian inventor living in Argentina), and the fibre-tip pen (first produced in Japan in the 1970s).

No other drawing tool can produce such a variety of texture as the pen or reveal so intimately the personal ‘handwriting’ of an artist. It is the ideal medium for rapidly noting down the first idea and has been used in this way by draughtsmen as different as Pisanello, Michelangelo, Dürer, and Rembrandt. However, it has also been used with great effect in a careful, calligraphic manner, as in Botticelli's illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy. Often pen drawing is combined with washes of ink.