The Crown of Wild Olive
upper dark touches. In distant mountains they may be made pines of, or
broken crags, or villages, or stones, or whatever you choose; in clouds
they may indicate the direction of the rain, the roll and outline of the
cloud masses; and in water, the minor waves. All noble effects of dark
atmosphere are got in good water-colour drawing by these two expedients,
interlacing the colours, or retouching the lower one with fine darker
drawing in an upper. Sponging and washing for dark atmospheric effect is
barbarous, and mere tyro's work, though it is often useful for passages
of delicate atmospheric light.
(_c._) When you have time, practice the production of mixed tints by
interlaced touches of the pure colours out of which they are formed, and
use the process at the parts of your sketches where you wish to get rich
and luscious effects. Study the works of William Hunt, of the Old
Water-colour Society, in this respect, continually, and make frequent
memoranda of the variegations in flowers; not painting the flower
completely, but laying the ground colour of one petal, and painting the
spots on it with studious precision: a series of single petals of
lilies, geraniums, tulips, &c., numbered with proper reference to their
position in the flower, will be interesting to you on many grounds
besides those of art. Be careful to get the _gradated_ distribution of
the spots well followed in the calceolarias, foxgloves, and the like;
and work out the odd, indefinite hues of the spots themselves with
minute grains of pure interlaced colour, otherwise you will never get
their richness of bloom. You will be surprised to find, as you do this,
first the universality of the law of gradation we have so much insisted
upon; secondly, that Nature is just as economical of _her_ fine colours
as I have told you to be of yours. You would think, by the way she
paints, that her colours cost her something enormous: she will only give
you a single pure touch just where the petal turns into light; but down
in the bell all is subdued, and under the petal all is subdued, even in
the showiest flower. What you thought was bright blue is, when you look
close, only dusty grey, or green, or purple, or every colour in the
world at once, only a single gleam or streak of pure blue in the centre
of it. And so with all her colours. Sometimes I have really thought her
miserliness intolerable: in a gentian, for instance, the way she
economises her ultramarine down in the bell is a little too bad.
Next, respecting general tone. I said, just now, that, for the sake of
students, my tax should not be laid on black or on white pigments; but
if you mean to be a colourist, you must lay a tax on them yourselves
when you begin to use true colour; that is to say, you must use them
little and make of them much. There is no better test of your colour
tones being good, than your having made the white in your picture
precious, and the black conspicuous.
I say, first, the white precious. I do not mean merely glittering or
brilliant; it is easy to scratch white seagulls out of black clouds and
dot clumsy foliage with chalky dew; but, when white is well managed, it
ought to be strangely delicious--tender as well as bright--like inlaid
mother of pearl, or white roses washed in milk. The eye ought to seek it
for rest, brilliant though it may be; and to feel it as a space of
strange, heavenly paleness in the midst of the flushing of the colours.
This effect you can only reach by general depth of middle tint, by
absolutely refusing to allow any white to exist except where you need
it, and by keeping the white itself subdued by grey, except at a few
points of chief lustre.
Secondly, you must make the black conspicuous. However small a point of
black may be, it ought to catch the eye, otherwise your work is too
heavy in the shadow. All the ordinary shadows should be of some
_colour_--never black, nor approaching black, they should be evidently
and always of a luminous nature, and the black should look strange among
them; never occurring except in a black object, or in small points
indicative of intense shade in the very centre of masses of shadow.
Shadows of absolutely negative grey, however, may be beautifully used
with white, or with gold; but still though the black thus, in subdued
strength, becomes _spacious_, it should always be _conspicuous_; the
spectator should notice this grey neutrality with some wonder, and
enjoy, all the more intensely on account of it, the gold colour and the
white which it relieves. Of all the great colourists Velasquez is the
greatest master of the black chords. His black is more precious than
most other people's crimson.
It is not, however, only white and black which you must make valuable;
you must give rare worth to every colour you use; but the white and
black ought to separate themselves quaintly from the rest, while the
other colours should be continually passing one into the other, being
all evidently companions in the same gay world; while the white, black,
and neutral grey should stand monkishly aloof in the midst of them. You
may melt your crimson into purple, your purple into blue and your blue
into green, but you must not melt any of them into black. You should,
however, try, as I said, to give _preciousness_ to all your colours; and
this especially by never using a grain more than will just do the work,
and giving each hue the highest value by opposition. All fine colouring,
like fine drawing, is _delicate_; and so delicate that if, at last, you
_see_ the colour you are putting on, you are putting on too much. You
ought to feel a change wrought in the general tone, by touches of colour
which individually are too pale to be seen; and if there is one atom of
any colour in the whole picture which is unnecessary to it, that atom
hurts it.
Notice also, that nearly all good compound colours are _odd_ colours.
You shall look at a hue in a good painter's work ten minutes before you
know what to call it. You thought it was brown, presently, you feel that
it is red; next that there is, somehow, yellow in it; presently
afterwards that there is blue in it. If you try to copy it you will
always find your colour too warm or too cold--no colour in the box will
seem to have any affinity with it; and yet it will be as pure as if it
were laid at a single touch with a single colour.
As to the choice and harmony of colours in general, if you cannot
choose and harmonize them by instinct, you will never do it at all. If
you need examples of utterly harsh and horrible colour, you may find
plenty given in treatises upon colouring, to illustrate the laws of
harmony; and if you want to colour beautifully, colour as best pleases
yourself at _quiet times_, not so as to catch the eye, nor to look as if
it were clever or difficult to colour in that way, but so that the
colour may be pleasant to you when you are happy, or thoughtful. Look
much at the morning and evening sky, and much at simple
flowers--dog-roses, wood hyacinths, violets, poppies, thistles, heather,
and such like--as Nature arranges them in the woods and fields. If ever
any scientific person tells you that two colours are "discordant," make
a note of the two colours, and put them together whenever you can. I
have actually heard people say that blue and green were discordant; the
two colours which Nature seems to intend never to be separated and never
to be felt, either of them, in its full beauty without the other!--a
peacock's neck, or a blue sky through green leaves, or a blue wave with
green lights though it, being precisely the loveliest things, next to
clouds at sunrise, in this coloured world of ours. If you have a good
eye for colours, you will soon find out how constantly Nature puts
purple and green together, purple and scarlet, green and blue, yellow
and neutral grey, and the like; and how she strikes these
colour-concords for general tones, and then works into them with
innumerable subordinate ones; and you will gradually come to like what
she does, and find out new and beautiful chords of colour in her work
every day. If you _enjoy_ them, depend upon it you will paint them to a
certain point right: or, at least, if you do not enjoy them, you are
certain to paint them wrong. If colour does not give you _intense_
pleasure, let it alone; depend upon it, you are only tormenting the eyes
and senses of people who feel colour, whenever you touch it; and that is
unkind and improper. You will find, also, your power of colouring depend
much on your state of health and right balance of mind; when you are
fatigued or ill you will not see colours well, and when you are
ill-tempered you will not choose them well: thus, though not infallibly
a test of character in individuals, colour power is a great sign of
mental health in nations; when they are in a state of intellectual
decline, their colouring always gets dull.[242] You must also take great
care not to be misled by affected talk about colour from people who have
not the gift of it: numbers are eager and voluble about it who probably
never in all their lives received one genuine colour-sensation. The
modern religionists of the school of Overbeck are just like people who
eat slate-pencil and chalk, and assure everybody that they are nicer and
purer than strawberries and plums.
Take care also never to be misled into any idea that colour can help or
display _form_; colour[243] always disguises form, and is meant to do
so.
It is a favourite dogma among modern writers on colour that "warm
colours" (reds and yellows) "approach" or express nearness, and "cold
colours" (blue and grey) "retire" or express distance. So far is this
from being the case, that no expression of distance in the world is so
great as that of the gold and orange in twilight sky. Colours, as such,
are ABSOLUTELY inexpressive respecting distance. It is their _quality_
(as depth, delicacy, &c.) which expresses distance, not their tint. A
blue bandbox set on the same shelf with a yellow one will not look an
inch farther off, but a red or orange cloud, in the upper sky, will
always appear to be beyond a blue cloud close to us, as it is in
reality. It is quite true that in certain objects, blue is a _sign_ of
distance; but that is not because blue is a retiring colour, but because
the mist in the air is blue, and therefore any warm colour which has not
strength of light enough to pierce the mist is lost or subdued in its
blue: but blue is no more, on this account, a "retiring colour," than
brown is a retiring colour, because, when stones are seen through brown
water, the deeper they lie the browner they look; or than yellow is a
retiring colour, because when objects are seen through a London fog, the
farther off they are the yellower they look. Neither blue, nor yellow,
nor red, can have, as such, the _smallest_ power of expressing either
nearness or distance: they express them only under the peculiar
circumstances which render them at the moment, or in that place, _signs_
of nearness or distance. Thus, vivid orange in an orange is a sign of
nearness, for if you put the orange a great way off, its colour will not
look so bright; but vivid orange in sky is a sign of distance, because
you cannot get the colour of orange in a cloud near you. So purple in a
violet or a hyacinth is a sign of nearness, because the closer you look
at them the more purple you see. But purple in a mountain is a sign of
distance, because a mountain close to you is not purple, but green or
grey. It may, indeed, be generally assumed that a tender or pale colour
will more or less express distance, and a powerful or dark colour
nearness; but even this is not always so. Heathery hills will usually
give a pale and tender purple near, and an intense and dark purple far