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Canvas and the Priming
Canvases can vary every bit as much as mattresses. Most artists prefer a linen canvas of good strength and appreciable thickness. But artists have painted on many types of fabric. They have used linen as fine as handkerchiefs or tough as sailcloth; they have used cotton; they have used burlap. Some of our early American painters even used bed-ticking. If you could look at a magnified cross section of a simple canvas painting, you would see at one edge the threads of the fabric support as they make a pattern in their weave.
The layer of size, if there were one, would be invisible as it has no appreciable thickness, but you could see the priming coat. Although there have been red, yellow and grey primings used at different times during the history of art, and now and again they are used today, most primings are whitish in color. On top of the priming comes the paint film, and above that is the varnish film. Magnified cross sections of paintings have been studied by scholars and scientists for about twenty years. If you saw one under a microscope, you could recognize quite a few of the strata.
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