Canvas white pigment and calcium carbonate is rather brittle and susceptible to cracking. As lead-based paint is poisonous, care has to be taken in using it. Various alternative and more flexible canvas primers are commercially available, the most popular being a synthetic latex paint composed of titanium dioxide and calcium carbonate, bound with a thermo-plastic emulsion. Many artists have painted onto unprimed canvas, such as Jackson Pollock, Kenneth Noland, Francis Bacon, Helen Frankenthaler, Dan Christensen, Larry Zox, Ronnie Landfield, Color Field painters, Lyrical Abstractionists and others. Staining acrylic paint into the fabric of cotton duck canvas was more benign and less
Portrait of the Artist Holding a Thistle of God. In 1805, Goethe saw a copy of this portrait in the museum at Leipzig and described it as of "inestimable value." According to Lawrence Gowing, who calls this "the most French of all his pictures", the "Portrait of the Artist Holding a Thistle" is singular among Dürer's paintings as "the touch is freer and color more iridescent than in any other picture one remembers". Portrait of the Artist Holding a Thistle Portrait of the Artist Holding a Thistle (or "Eryngium") is an oil painting on parchment pasted on canvas by German artist Albrecht Dürer. Painted in 1493, it