George Field

“ Nature employs this hue beautifully in landscape, as a sub-dominant, in harmonizing the broad shadows of a bright sunshine ere the light sinks into deep orange or red. Girtin, who saw Nature as she is, and painted what he saw, delighted in this effect of sunlight and shadow. As a ruling colour, whether in flesh or otherwise, purple is commonly too cold, or verges on ghastliness, a fault which is to be as much avoided as the opposite extreme of viciousness in colouring, stigmatized as foxiness. ”

“ He has no right to use orpiment instead of cadmium yellow, or red lead instead of vermilion, or copper blue instead of cobalt: he has no business to employ indigo when Prussian blue saddened by black will answer his purpose; but—what pigment can he substitute for Prussian blue itself? None. In its wondrous depth, richness, and transparency, it stands alone: there is no yellow to compare with it, no red to equal it, no blue to rival it. In force and power it is a colour among colours, and transparent beyond them all. ”

“ The painter's pigments are the bricks wherewith the mortar of his mind must be mixed, either to erect an edifice that shall endure for ages, or one which will quickly topple over like a house of cards. Now in nothing more than in painting is prevention better than cure—indeed cure may be said to be here out of the question: for good or for evil a picture once painted is painted for ever. Without a strong constitution there is no hope for it; no chemistry can strengthen the sickly frame, restore the faded colour, stop the ravages of consumption: Science stands helpless before dying Art. ”

“ Look at those tables of mixed tints of which artist-authors are so fond, and tell us whether they always bear scrutiny—surely not. Admirable, perfect as these tints may be in an artistic sense, how often is their beauty like the hectic flush of consumption, which carries with it the seeds of a certain death. Will that orange where Indian yellow figures ever see old age, or that green with indigo, or purple with cochineal lake? Will they not rather spread over the picture the Upas-tree of fugacity, and kill it as they die themselves! ”

“ On the palette of nature each colour is an example of colouring: no colour is too absolute or defined, [186] no perfectly pure blue appears beside a perfectly pure green. A blue flower nestled in its green leaves does not offend the nicest eye, but the blue and green are not blue and green alone. There is, perhaps, but a single gleam of pure colour in each: the rest is composed of such varied hues and tints and shades, so broken and blended and beautifully harmonized, that no jarring discord is possible. Hue melts into hue, tint into tint, shade into shade ”

“ The blue has so much of the property of light in it, and of the tint of air—is so purely a sky-colour, and hence so singularly adapted to the direct and reflex light of the sky, and to become the antagonist of sunshine—that it is indispensable to the painter. Moreover, it is so pure, so true, so unchangeable in its tints and glazings, as to be no less essential in imitating the marvellous colouring of nature in flesh and flowers. ”

“ Art cannot, indeed, attain its appropriate end, that of pleasing, without excellence in colouring. It is colour which the true artist most loves, and it is colouring in all its complex and high relations, that he ever seeks to attain. Looking above, and around, and beneath him, with the intelligent eye of the colourist, he finds a boundless source of never-ceasing enjoyment. With harmonies and accordances lost to the untutored gaze, colour meets him in every stone he treads on—in the mineral, vegetable, and animal creation—in the heavens, sea, and earth. ”

“ The general attributes of a perfect pigment are beauty of colour, comprehending pureness and richness, brilliancy and intensity, delicacy and depth,—truth of hue—transparency or opacity, well-working, crispness, setting up, or keeping its place, and desiccation, or drying well. To all of these must be superadded durability when used, a quality to which the health and vitality of a picture belong, and one so essential that all other properties put together without it are of no esteem with the artist who merits reputation. ”

“ Complex and uncertain in composition, uncertain too in its habitudes, our best course perhaps will be not to attempt a complete survey, but to state briefly those facts which bear on the artist's craft.
Prussian blue is a colour of vast body and wonderful transparency, with a soft velvety richness, and of such intense depth as to appear black in its deepest washes. Notwithstanding it lasts a long time under favourable circumstances, its tints fade by the action of strong light; becoming white, according to Chevreul, in the direct rays of the sun, but regaining its blue colour in the dark ”

“ They are at once less definite and less generally evident, but more delightful—more frequent in nature, though rarer in common art, than the like relations of the secondaries and primaries. There is very little pure colour in the world: now and then a gleam dazzles us, like a burst of sunshine through grey mists; but as a rule, nature prefers broken colours to absolute hues. Most pure in spring, most full in summer, most mellow in autumn, [312] most sober in winter, her tints and shades of colour are always more or less interlaced, from white and the primaries to the semi-neutral and black. ”

“ With it may be coupled Cadmium Orange, a colour equally brilliant and stable, and equally without rankness or harshness, but of a true orange hue, admirably adapted for sunsets and the like. Last of all the fresh pigments of whose thorough durability there is no doubt, comes the splendid Viridian, a green nothing but fire will change, and no mixture of blue and yellow will afford. Clear, bright, and transparent as the emerald, it rivals velvet in [43] its soft gorgeous richness. With this and Aureolin a series of beautiful foliage tints may be formed, sparkling with sunshine, as it were. ”

“ Rich and beautiful as it is, purple madder cannot be called brilliant; while Mars violet is, of course, ochrous. Unlike green and orange, therefore, purple can point to no original pigment at once vivid and durable: as regards purple, brilliancy implies a semi-stability that borders more or less closely on fugacity. Until the advent of a perfect palette, however, brilliancy and semi-stability will doubtless hold their own. ”

“ Red breaks and diffuses with white with peculiar loveliness. It is discordant when standing with orange only, requiring to be joined or accompanied by their proper contrast, to resolve or harmonize the dissonance. In landscapes, &c., abounding with hues allied to green, a red object properly placed as regards light, shade, or distance, conduces wonderfully to the life, beauty, harmony, and connexion of the colouring. Red is, indeed, the chief element of beauty in floral nature, the prime ornament of the green garb of the vegetal kingdom. ”

“ Deploring an error neither flattering to the craft they practise nor to themselves, we would urge such to bear in mind this axiom, semi-stable pigments become fugitive when used in thin washes. Even in body they do not preserve their primitive hue, but in glazing and the like, their colour altogether flies or is wholly destroyed.
It is this semi-stability, recommended to the thoughtless and indifferent by the beauty which generally accompanies it, that is the bane of modern art. Even our greatest painters have yielded to its fascination. ”

“ The knavish practices to which the pigment has been subjected, have acquired it an ill-fame both with authors and artists. Vermilion has been charged with fading in the light, and with being blackened by impure air; but it was the custom to crimson the colour by means of lake, or tone it to a scarlet hue by red lead. With pigments as with persons, evil communications corrupt good manners—a motto that might be written with advantage on every palette. ”

“ Colours are advancing or retiring in their quality—as depth, delicacy, &c., not in their hue. A blue object set side-by-side a yellow one will not look an inch farther off, but a red or orange cloud, in the upper sky, will always seem to be beyond a blue cloud close to us, as it is in reality. We grant that in certain objects, blue is a sign of distance, but that is not because blue, as a mere colour, is retiring; 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. ”

“ Impure black is brown, but black in its purity is a cold colour, and communicates a coolness to all light colours; thus it blues white, greens yellow, [388] purples red, and cools blue. Hence the artist errs with ill effect who regards black as of nearest affinity to hot and brown colours, and will do well to keep in mind—"The glow of sunshine and the cool of shade."
It is a fault of even some of our best colourists, as evinced by their pictures, to be too fond of black upon their palettes, and thence to infuse it needlessly into their tints and colours. ”

“ A light and pleasing blue, with a greenish-grey cast by day, it possesses little depth or richness, and is far excelled in beauty by a good aluminous cobalt. A certain chalkiness, moreover, somewhat detracts from its transparency, and militates against its use in water. It is in oil, and as a night colour, that cœruleum becomes of service, as our present system of lighting picture galleries by gas affects the purity of blues generally. ”

“ Of a truth, if man cannot dip his brush in the rainbow and paint with the aerial colours of the skies, he can at least select the best pigments that earth and the sea afford him; preferring, where he cannot get brilliancy and permanence combined, sobriety and permanence to brilliancy and fugacity. It must be the wish of every real artist to leave behind him a lasting record of his skill, a permanent panorama of those [412] hues of nature which in life he loved so well. To effect this, genius alone is powerless: there must be first a proper choice of materials, and next a proper use of them. ”

“ As colour is added to colour, and mixture to mixture, acid meets alkali, metal animal, mineral vegetable, inorganic organic. With so close a union of opposite and opposing elements, the wonder is not so much that pictures sometimes perish, but that they ever live. It behoves the artist, then, not only to procure the best and most permanent pigments possible, but to compound them in such a manner that his mixed tints may be durable as well as beautiful. ”

“ This should be a matter of congratulation to the painter, who must of necessity rely on the faith and honesty of his colour-dealer; for if he were ever so good a chemist, it would be impossible for him to analyse each pigment before proceeding to use it. The fault must rest with himself, therefore, if, through a mistaken economy, he do not frequent the best houses and pay the best prices. Of a surety, the colours of the artist are not among those things in which quality can, or should, be sacrificed to cheapness. ”

“ For the reason that each colour has its antagonist, and consequently may affect a picture well or ill, according to its tone or general hue, there can be no universally good colour for such a purpose. What suits one picture or style of painting may not suit another: with a blood-red sunset, for instance, or portrait with crimson drapery, marrone would be out of place. But as it is impossible to provide each picture with a separate background, all that can be done in large collections is to study the general effect, sacrificing the interests of the few to the good of the many. ”

“ In the work of every true artist—between whom and the mere painter there is as much difference as between the poet and the poetaster—there is sentiment as well as colour, whether the subject be an exciting battle-scene or a bit of still life. This sentiment, as strongly felt as the colour is clearly seen, is imparted in no small degree by the skilful use of semi-neutrality, the compounding of which, as time goes on, will therefore affect a picture for good or for evil. ”

“ There is an ancient doctrine that the azure of the sky is a compound of light and darkness, and some have argued hence that blue is not a primary colour, but a mixture of black and white; but pure or neutral black and white compound in infinite shades, all of which are neutral also, or grey. It is true that a mixture of black and white is of a cool hue, because black is not a primary colour, but a compound of the three primary colours in which blue predominates, a predominance which is rendered more sensible when black is diluted with white. ”