The Crown of Wild Olive
and forever. Had one line or hair of them gone wrong, it would have been
wrong forever; no retouching could have mended it. The poor copyists
daub in first some background, and then some dog's hair; then retouch
the background, then the hair, work for hours at it, expecting it always
to come right to-morrow--"when it is finished." They _may_ work for
centuries at it, and they will never do it. If they can do it with
Veronese's allowance of work, half a dozen sweeps of the hand over the
dark background, well; if not, they may ask the dog himself whether it
will ever come right, and get true answer from him--on Launce's
conditions: "If he say 'ay,' it will; if he say 'no,' it will; if he
shake his tail and say nothing, it will."
Whenever you lay on a mass of colour, be sure that however large it may
be, or however small, it shall be gradated. No colour exists in Nature
under ordinary circumstances without gradation. If you do not see this,
it is the fault of your inexperience; you _will_ see it in due time, if
you practise enough. But in general you may see it at once. In the birch
trunk, for instance, the rosy grey _must_ be gradated by the roundness
of the stem till it meets the shaded side; similarly the shaded side is
gradated by reflected, light. Accordingly, whether by adding water, or
white paint, or by unequal force of touch (this you will do at pleasure,
according to the texture you wish to produce), you must, in every tint
you lay on, make it a little paler at one part than another, and get an
even gradation between the two depths. This is very like laying down a
formal law or recipe for you; but you will find it is merely the
assertion of a natural fact. It is not indeed physically impossible to
meet with an ungradated piece of colour, but it is so supremely
improbable, that you had better get into the habit of asking yourself
invariably, when you are going to copy a tint,--not "_Is_ that
gradated?" but "_Which way_ is it gradated?" and at least in ninety-nine
out of a hundred instances, you will be able to answer decisively after
a careful glance, though the gradation may have been so subtle that you
did not see it at first. And it does not matter how small the touch of
colour may be, though not larger than the smallest pin's head, if one
part of it is not darker than the rest, it is a bad touch; for it is not
merely because the natural fact is so, that your colour should be
gradated; the preciousness and pleasantness of the colour itself depends
more on this than on any other of its qualities, for gradation is to
colours just what curvature is to lines, both being felt to be beautiful
by the pure instinct of every human mind, and both, considered as types,
expressing the law of gradual change and progress in the human soul
itself. What the difference is in mere beauty between a gradated and
ungradated colour, may be seen easily by laying an even tint of
rose-colour on paper, and putting a rose leaf beside it. The victorious
beauty of the rose as compared with other flowers, depends wholly on the
delicacy and quantity of its colour gradations, all other flowers being
either less rich in gradation, not having so many folds of leaf; or less
tender, being patched and veined instead of flushed.
4. But observe, it is not enough in general that colour should be
gradated by being made merely paler or darker at one place than another.
Generally colour _changes_ as it _diminishes_, and is not merely
_darker_ at one spot, but also _purer_ at one spot than anywhere else.
It does not in the least follow that the darkest spot should be the
purest; still less so that the lightest should be the purest. Very often
the two gradations more or less cross each other, one passing in one
direction from paleness to darkness, another in another direction from
purity to dullness, but there will almost always be both of them,
however reconciled; and you must never be satisfied with a piece of
colour until you have got both: that is to say, every piece of blue that
you lay on must be _quite_ blue only at some given spot, nor that a
large spot; and must be gradated from that into less pure blue--greyish
blue, or greenish blue, or purplish blue, over all the rest of the space
it occupies. And this you must do in one of three ways: either, while
the colour is wet, mix it with the colour which is to subdue it, adding
gradually a little more and a little more; or else, when the colour is
quite dry, strike a gradated touch of another colour over it, leaving
only a point of the first tint visible: or else, lay the subduing tints
on in small touches, as in the exercise of tinting the chess-board. Of
each of these methods I have something to tell you separately: but that
is distinct from the subject of gradation, which I must not quit without
once more pressing upon you the preeminent necessity of introducing it
everywhere. I have profound dislike of anything like _habit_ of hand,
and yet, in this one instance, I feel almost tempted to encourage you to
get into a habit of never touching paper with colour, without securing a
gradation. You will not in Turner's largest oil pictures, perhaps six or
seven feet long by four or five high, find one spot of colour as large
as a grain of wheat ungradated: and you will find in practice, that
brilliancy of hue, and vigour of light, and even the aspect of
transparency in shade, are essentially dependent on this character
alone; hardness, coldness, and opacity resulting far more from
_equality_ of colour than from nature of colour. Give me some mud off a
city crossing, some ochre out of a gravel pit, a little whitening, and
some coal-dust, and I will paint you a luminous picture, if you give me
time to gradate my mud, and subdue my dust: but though you had the red
of the ruby, the blue of the gentian, snow for the light, and amber for
the gold, you cannot paint a luminous picture, if you keep the masses of
those colours unbroken in purity, and unvarying in depth.
5. Next note the three processes by which gradation and other characters
are to be obtained:
A. Mixing while the colour is wet.
You may be confused by my first telling you to lay on the hues in
separate patches, and then telling you to mix hues together as you lay
them on: but the separate masses are to be laid, when colours distinctly
oppose each other at a given limit; the hues to be mixed, when they
palpitate one through the other, or fade one into the other. It is
better to err a little on the distinct side. Thus I told you to paint
the dark and light sides of the birch trunk separately, though in
reality, the two tints change, as the trunk turns away from the light,
gradually one into the other: and, after being laid separately on, will
need some farther touching to harmonize them: but they do so in a very
narrow space, marked distinctly all the way up the trunk; and it is
easier and safer, therefore, to keep them separate at first. Whereas it
often happens that the whole beauty of two colours will depend on the
one being continued well through the other, and playing in the midst of
it: blue and green often do so in water: blue and grey, or purple and
scarlet, in sky; in hundreds of such instances the most beautiful and
truthful results may be obtained by laying one colour into the other
while wet; judging wisely how far it will spread, or blending it with
the brush in somewhat thicker consistence of wet body-colour; only
observe, never mix in this way two _mixtures_; let the colour you lay
into the other be always a simple, not a compound tint.
B. Laying one colour over another.
If you lay on a solid touch of vermilion, and, after it is quite dry,
strike a little very wet carmine quickly over it, you will obtain a much
more brilliant red than by mixing the carmine and vermilion. Similarly,
if you lay a dark colour first, and strike a little blue or white
body-colour lightly over it, you will get a more beautiful grey than by
mixing the colour and the blue or white. In very perfect painting,
artifices of this kind are continually used; but I would not have you
trust much to them; they are apt to make you think too much of quality
of colour. I should like you to depend on little more than the dead
colours, simply laid on, only observe always this, that the _less_
colour you do the work with, the better it will always be:[240] so that
if you have laid a red colour, and you want a purple one above, do not
mix the purple on your palette and lay it on so thick as to overpower
the red, but take a little thin blue from your palette, and lay it
lightly over the red, so as to let the red be seen through, and thus
produce the required purple; and if you want a green hue over a blue
one, do not lay a quantity of green on the blue, but a _little_ yellow,
and so on, always bringing the under colour into service as far as you
possibly can. If, however, the colour beneath is wholly opposed to the
one you have to lay on, as, suppose, if green is to be laid over
scarlet, you must either remove the required parts of the under colour
daintily first with your knife, or with water; or else, lay solid white
over it massively, and leave that to dry, and then glaze the white with
the upper colour. This is better, in general, than laying the upper
colour itself so thick as to conquer the ground, which, in fact, if it
be a transparent colour, you cannot do. Thus, if you have to strike
warm boughs and leaves of trees over blue sky, and they are too
intricate to have their places left for them in laying the blue, it is
better to lay them first in solid white, and then glaze with sienna and
ochre, than to mix the sienna and white; though, of course, the process
is longer and more troublesome. Nevertheless, if the forms of touches
required are very delicate, the after glazing is impossible. You must
then mix the warm colour thick at once, and so use it: and this is often
necessary for delicate grasses, and such other fine threads of light in
foreground work.
C. Breaking one colour in small points through or over another.
This is the most important of all processes in good modern[241] oil and
water-colour painting, but you need not hope to attain very great skill
in it. To do it well is very laborious, and requires such skill and
delicacy of hand as can only be acquired by unceasing practice. But you
will find advantage in noting the following points:
(_a._) In distant effects of rich subjects, wood, or rippled water, or
broken clouds, much may be done by touches or crumbling dashes of rather
dry colour, with other colours afterwards put cunningly into the
interstices. The more you practise this, when the subject evidently
calls for it, the more your eye will enjoy the higher qualities of
colour. The process is, in fact, the carrying out of the principle of
separate colours to the utmost possible refinement; using atoms of
colour in juxtaposition, instead of large spaces. And note, in filling
up minute interstices of this kind, that if you want the colour you fill
them with to show brightly, it is better to put a rather positive point
of it, with a little white left beside or round it in the interstice,
than to put a pale tint of the colour over the whole interstice. Yellow
or orange will hardly show, if pale, in small spaces; but they show
brightly in firm touches, however small, with white beside them.
(_b._) If a colour is to be darkened by superimposed portions of
another, it is, in many cases, better to lay the uppermost colour in
rather vigorous small touches, like finely chopped straw, over the under
one, than to lay it on as a tint, for two reasons: the first, that the
play of the two colours together is pleasant to the eye; the second,
that much expression of form may be got by wise administration of the