bistre
- n a water-soluble brownish-yellow pigment made by boiling wood soot
- A ghostly group of apostles in bistre (a soft soot brown) watch Christ ascend off the paper in the deft dreaminess of the quattrocento hand of Andrea Mantegna.
- They could not, however, approach the beautiful, sure clarity with which Rem brandt set down, in a few streaks and slashes of bistre, a windmill facing the estuary from an old .