History of the Airbrush

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Reprinted with permission from Airbrush Action (February 2000)

The versatile tool we know as the airbrush has a pedigree that stretches back only a bit more than a century. A hundred years ago, artists were using the same combination of mixed paint and air they use today, produced by basically the same instrument.

Through the years, engineering has created better tolerances for moving parts and finer nozzles and needles, and modern materials have altered the airbrush’s feel and heft. Still an airbrusher of today, dropped magically into the late 1800s, wouldn't have much trouble picking up one of the earliest models and using it.

What many consider to be the first "airbrush"—patented in England in 1893—was gravity-fed, with the paint cup in its body. It was double action and had a platinum, changeable nozzle with a .007 inch bore size. About the only major difference between it and today's versions was that the hose connection pushed in. Screw connections didn't arrive until sometime in the 1920s.

American Charles L. Burdick, who obtained the British patent for the airbrush, is generally viewed as its father. Burdick, who also invented coin counting and sorting machines, produced one of the first airbrush designs in 1893 when he founded the Fountain Brush Co. in London.

As a watercolor artist, Burdick was hunting for a way to apply additional coats of watercolor to paintings without using a brush, which tended to disturb and smear earlier coats. Obviously, his invention was ideal.

Burdick, however, may have actually been the second or third person to develop an airbrush. An American patent for an airbrush case was approved in 1888, but what happened to it seems lost. Some reports indicate that an American named Abner Peeler may have invented the modern airbrush in 1878, fifteen years before Burdick's patent in England. In 1881, Peeler sold his airbrush patent to Liberty Walkup, who founded the Rockford Airbrush Co. two years later.

Whether or not Peeler was really the first inventor or Walkup began the first manufacture of the airbrush a decade before Burdick in England, it's fairly well established that use of the airbrush began in the late 1800s.

Burdick called his new art tool the Aerograph, a name that became such a generic term for the airbrush by 1900 that he changed his company’s name to "The Aerograph Co."

Some people will quickly point out that spraying pigment was not exactly a new idea by the 1890s. Some early artist squatting in a smoky, fire-lit cave about 35,000 years ago sprayed an outline of his hand with pigment, probably through a reed or hollow bone.

Even though there’s evidence—the oldest piece, an image from 33,000 BC found in Lascaux and Pech-Merle, France; another dating back to 13,000 BC found in a Spanish cave—that the idea lingered for a good 20,000 years, Burdick still gets primary credit for the airbrush.

Regardless of its true parent, the airbrush was quickly adapted to photo retouching, which remained its primary use for decades, even lasting long enough to enhance the appearance of modern magazine centerfolds.

While the Aerograph was based in Britain and Europe, Americans were developing and manufacturing their own lines, and they are some of the most recognized airbrush brands today. One such innovator was a Norwegian immigrant named Jens A. Paasche.

Paasche opened a company in Chicago in 1904 and turned out his first product, one that is still around today–the demanding but highly precise Paasche AB. It is still such an engineering and mechanical marvel, it’s difficult to believe that the first one was produced 95 years ago. Eventually, some of the airbrush developers who worked with Paasche early on went out on their own to establish other companies, like Badger. Thayer & Chandler formed a company in 1891 and displayed their products at the Columbian Exposition in 1893.

Also in existence by this time were manually powered compressors that called for the artist to fill a holding tank by using a foot pump. A Burdick model for non-professionals—called the "Amateur"—had a hand pump. Electric compressors became available at about the same time the modern airbrush was developed.

In the early days, the airbrushes were gravity-fed. It took a development by a physician to move the technology into suction-feed versions, an advance that came about for a reason completely unconnected to the airbrush.

In the late 1880s, Dr. Allen DeVilbiss was looking for a way to apply throat medication without causing discomfort to the patient. His device for atomizing the medicine was the familiar rubber bulb and hose, which for decades became the standard for perfume bottles. By 1890, DeVilbiss had opened his own company.

In 1931 when his friend Burdick, the granddaddy of the airbrush, wanted to return to the United States, an English branch of the DeVilbiss business merged with The Aerograph Co.

The airbrush was initially embraced by artists retouching photos. With the invention of the Daguerreotype in 1839, the need to retouch photographs quickly became obvious, but the only way to do it was by hand brushing, which was imprecise and left brush strokes. Still, by the 1860s, hand photo retouching was common.

In early days, primitive cameras and developing technology were largely to blame for the need to retouch photographs. As cameras improved, the reasons for photo retouching also evolved. It seems that even back then, photographic subjects didn't like the idea of wrinkles, warts, moles and other imperfections being preserved forever. Traditional portrait artists had simply left unsightly blemishes out of their paintings. The sometimes unflattering reality of photographed images posed a particular new problem, and the airbrush provided a useful solution.

By the late 1890s, photographs became so popular that retouching factories were needed to meet the demand, employing scores of workers to add color and improve the images, all done with the airbrush. These workshops probably lasted well into the early 1900s.

With precise masking and invisible presence, the airbrush could remove imperfections and add color, and there was a strong demand for colorizing the sepia photographs (though there was no reliable color reproduction until about 1910). The airbrush was used extensively until recently Now, computer and darkroom technology have all but replaced the airbrush for altering photographs.

Despite its initial purpose as a tool for watercolor painters, use of the airbrush for both commercial and fine art are fairly rare during its early years. In a contest held in Paris in 1904, Sidney G. Winney won a contest for airbrushing. Work by Burdick and others still remain, including a freehand airbrush portrait of the tool's inventor.

As we sometimes find today, there was some prejudice among the upper crust of the fine art world, who considered the airbrush to be a mechanical device rather than an artist's tool. Airbrush artists were perceived as technicians because they never directly touched their work. Burdick was barred from showing his paintings at London's Royal Academy of Art because he used the airbrush.

It wasn't until after World War I that the art world (especially in Europe) and the growing advertising and publishing industries began to embrace the airbrush to produce images. In France during the 1920s, the Art Deco movement found the airbrush useful for its broad images. That, coupled with the increase in advertising, boosted the popularity of airbrush.

In the 1920s, advertising began to blossom. Some say its growth was driven by increased competition in the auto industry. Around the same time, poster art became a large force in advertising, emerging ahead of magazines that didn't hit their stride until the 1930s. The earliest example of commercial airbrush illustration in the U.S., which appeared in a judged show in the New York Art Director’s Annual, was in 1928.

The Bauhaus movement in Germany easily adopted the airbrush in the ‘20s. The primary founder of the Bauhaus style was Walter Gropius, who was born the same year Burdick patented the airbrush. Bauhaus, with its love of machinery and nearly mathematical vision of design, remains a foundation for art and design teaching and theory today, despite the fact that the school Gropius founded was disbanded by the Nazis in 1933. Gropius himself died 1969, but he lived almost long enough to see the second rebirth of the tool.

Bauhaus artists such as Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Joseph Albers (1888-1976) and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) found the airbrush useful and used it. But like most in the movement, they saw it as just one of many techniques and tools. Another Bauhaus artist, Herbert Bayer, found the airbrush allowed him to develop his concepts of simplicity and directness in graphic design.

Many of those artists, such as Bayer, Gropius, Moholy-Nagy and Albers, brought the Bauhaus techniques and ideas to the U.S. during the 1930s. Bayer, who taught airbrush in the Bauhaus schools, came to this country in 1938 and became a driving force in graphics and design.

The Bauhaus artists were not alone in using this fairly new device. In Europe, where poster art and advertising merged into a mix of fine and commercial art, the artist Cassandre used an airbrush. So did Joseph Binder, an artist from Vienna who remains a strong influence on modern art.

One of the more famous artists to explore the airbrush, if only for a short time, was Man Ray (1890-1977) who was also an innovative photographer and film maker. In 1917, he used the airbrush as another way to rebel against convention, creating highly realistic black and white paintings he called Aerographs. Unfortunately his Aerographs were hardly met with positive critical acclaim. Already controversial, he was vilified for "taking the soul out of painting" by using a mechanical device. His realistic Aerograph works were often mistaken for photographs. He gave up the airbrush in 1919.

As influential as some of these artists proved to be, the popularity of their styles—Art Deco and Bauhaus—was fading by the early days of World War II.

Fortunately, artists who later revived and brought the airbrush back into the public eye were around to see it being used in its earliest form. George Petty was likely exposed to the airbrush in his father's studio and Alberto Vargas reportedly picked up his first airbrush in 1898, although he may not have started using the device until later.

During and after the war, these two artists would have a major impact on art, our culture, and use of the airbrush.

Some of the sources for this first installment of the airbrush's history include David Willardson; The Complete Guide to Airbrushing Techniques and Materials by Judy Martin; The Complete Manual of Airbrushing by Peter Owen and Jane Rollason; The Airbrush Book by Seng-Gye Tombs Curtis and Christopher Hunt.