Nearly every popular painting you can think of is a type of oil painting. For example, perhaps the most famous painting of all time, Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, was created using oil paint. Oil paintings were invented somewhere around the 5th century AD by artists from India and China in western Afghanistan, who used oil paints to make Buddhist paintings. However, the height of its popularity did not come about until the 15th century, and helped to usher in the Renaissance period. At that time, artists were responsible for mixing their own paints, using pure pigments and various oils. It benefited the artist by allowing them to produce the exact shade they needed, but it also limited them, because carting many containers of pigments and oils to various places to create their art (for example, outdoor painting) was very difficult. Because of this, artists were often relegated to painting only within the confines of their studio, and could not capture nature as they would have liked to.
Fortunately, by the early 1800s, pre-mixed tubes of oil paint began to be mass-produced, which gave artists much more freedom to choose the location where they wanted to paint. This helped usher in the Impressionist period, in which many artists began painting outside to capture sunlight on the canvas.
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