A panel is a rigid support for a picture — most often wood, but also metal, board, or other solid material — distinct from a stretched fabric canvas.
Panel painting predates canvas as the standard support for portable works in Europe; oak in the north, poplar in Italy, and a range of other woods elsewhere were prepared with grounds and painted directly. A panel is identified by its rigidity, its often visible grain or join, and the fact that it does not flex like canvas under handling. In the broader sense a panel is also any single discrete pictorial unit within a multi-part work — the left panel of a triptych, the third panel of a polyptych, a panel in a comic strip — where it names the bounded compartment rather than the support material. Both senses are in regular use; context decides.
See also
- triptych — the three-panel format
- ground — the prepared layer on a panel’s surface
- picture-plane — the surface a panel makes physical