Part 78 (1/2)
[235] All the degradation of art which was brought about, after the rise of the Dutch school, by asphaltum, yellow varnish, and brown trees, would have been prevented, if only painters had been forced to work in dead colour. Any colour will do for some people, if it is browned and s.h.i.+ning; but fallacy in dead colour is detected on the instant. I even believe that whenever a painter begins to _wish_ that he could touch any portion of his work with gum, he is going wrong.
It is necessary, however, in this matter, carefully to distinguish between translucency and l.u.s.tre. Translucency, though, as I have said above, a dangerous temptation, is, in its place, beautiful; but l.u.s.tre, or _s.h.i.+niness_, is always, in painting, a defect. Nay, one of my best painter-friends (the ”best” being understood to attach to both divisions of that awkward compound word), tried the other day to persuade me thatl.u.s.tre was an ign.o.bleness in _anything_; and it was only the fear of treason to ladies' eyes, and to mountain streams, and to morning dew, which kept me from yielding the point to him. One is apt always to generalise too quickly in such matters; but there can be no question that l.u.s.tre is destructive of loveliness in colour, as it is of intelligibility in form. Whatever may be the pride of a young beauty in the knowledge that her eyes s.h.i.+ne (though perhaps even eyes are most beautiful in dimness), she would be sorry if her cheeks did; and which of us would wish to polish a rose?
[236] But not s.h.i.+ny or greasy. Bristol board, or hot-pressed imperial, or grey paper that feels slightly adhesive to the hand, is best. Coa.r.s.e, gritty, and sandy papers are fit only for blotters and blunderers; no good draughtsman would lay a line on them. Turner worked much on a thin tough paper, dead in surface; rolling up his sketches in tight bundles that would go deep into his pockets.
[237] I insist upon this unalterability of colour the more because I address you as a beginner, or an amateur; a great artist can sometimes get out of a difficulty with credit, or repent without confession. Yet even t.i.tian's alterations usually show as stains on his work.
[238] It is, I think, a piece of affectation to try to work with few colours; it saves time to have enough tints prepared without mixing, and you may at once allow yourself these twenty-four. If you arrange them in your colour-box in the order I have set them down, you will always easily put your finger on the one you want.
Cobalt. Smalt. Antwerp blue. Prussian blue.
Black. Gamboge. Emerald green. Hooker's green.
Lemon yellow. Cadmium yellow. Yellow ochre. Roman ochre.
Raw sienna. Burnt sienna. Light red. Indian red.
Mars orange. Ext't of vermilion. Carmine. Violet carmine.
Brown madder. Burnt umber. Vand.y.k.e brown. Sepia.
Antwerp blue and Prussian blue are not very permanent colours, but you need not care much about permanence in your own work as yet, and they are both beautiful; while Indigo is marked by Field as more fugitive still, and is very ugly. Hooker's green is a mixed colour, put in the box merely to save you loss of time in mixing gamboge and Prussian blue.
No. 1. is the best tint of it. Violet carmine is a n.o.ble colour for laying broken shadows with, to be worked into afterwards with other colours.
If you wish to take up colouring seriously, you had better get Field's ”Chromatography” at once; only do not attend to anything it says about principles or harmonies of colour; but only to its statements of practical serviceableness in pigments, and of their operations on each other when mixed, &c.
[239] A more methodical, though, under general circ.u.mstances, uselessly prolix way, is to cut a square hole, some half an inch wide, in the sheet of cardboard, and a series of small circular holes in a slip of cardboard an inch wide. Pa.s.s the slip over the square opening, and match each colour beside one of the circular openings. You will thus have no occasion to wash any of the colours away. But the first rough method is generally all you want, as after a little practice, you only need to _look_ at the hue through the opening in order to be able to transfer it to your drawing at once.
[240] If colours were twenty times as costly as they are, we should have many more good painters. If I were Chancellor of the Exchequer I would lay a tax of twenty s.h.i.+llings a cake on all colours except black, Prussian blue, Vand.y.k.e brown, and Chinese white, which I would leave for students. I don't say this jestingly; I believe such a tax would do more to advance real art than a great many schools of design.
[241] I say _modern_, because t.i.tian's quiet way of blending colours, which is the perfectly right one, is not understood now by any artist.
The best colour we reach is got by stippling; but this not quite right.
[242] The worst general character that colour can possibly have is a prevalent tendency to a dirty yellowish green, like that of a decaying heap of vegetables; this colour is _accurately_ indicative of decline or paralysis in missal-painting.
[243] That is to say, local colour inherent in the object. The gradations of colour in the various shadows belonging to various lights exhibit form, and therefore no one but a colourist can ever draw _forms_ perfectly (see ”Modern Painters,” vol. iv. chap. iii. at the end); but all notions of explaining form by superimposed colour, as in architectural mouldings, are absurd. Colour adorns form, but does not interpret it. An apple is prettier, because it is striped, but it does not look a bit rounder; and a cheek is prettier because it is flushed, but you would see the form of the cheek bone better if it were not.
Colour may, indeed, detach one shape from another, as in grounding a bas-relief, but it always diminishes the appearance of projection, and whether you put blue, purple, red, yellow, or green, for your ground, the bas-relief will be just as clearly or just as imperfectly relieved, as long as the colours are of equal depth. The blue ground will not retire the hundredth part of an inch more than the red one.
[244] See, however, at the close of this letter, the notice of one more point connected with the management of colour, under the head ”Law of Harmony.”
[245] See farther, on this subject, ”Modern Painters,” vol. iv. chap.
viii - 6.
[246] ”In general, throughout Nature, reflection and repet.i.tion are peaceful things, a.s.sociated with the idea of quiet succession in events, that one day should be like another day, or one history the repet.i.tion of another history, being more or less results of quietness, while dissimilarity and non-succession are results of interference and disquietude. Thus, though an echo actually increases the quant.i.ty of sound heard, its repet.i.tion of the note or syllable gives an idea of calmness attainable in no other way; hence also the feeling of calm given to a landscape by the voice of a cuckoo.”
[247] This is obscure in the rude woodcut, the masts being so delicate that they are confused among the lines of reflection. In the original they have orange light upon them, relieved against purple behind.
[248] The cost of art in getting a bridge level is _always_ lost, for you must get up to the height of the central arch at any rate, and you only can make the whole bridge level by putting the hill farther back, and pretending to have got rid of it when you have not, but have only wasted money in building an unnecessary embankment. Of course, the bridge should not be difficultly or dangerously steep, but the necessary slope, whatever it may be, should be in the bridge itself, as far as the bridge can take it, and not pushed aside into the approach, as in our Waterloo road; the only rational excuse for doing which is that when the slope must be long it is inconvenient to put on a drag at the top of the bridge, and that any restiveness of the horse is more dangerous on the bridge than on the embankment. To this I answer: first, it is not more dangerous in reality, though it looks so, for the bridge is always guarded by an effective parapet, but the embankment is sure to have no parapet, or only a useless rail; and secondly, that it is better to have the slope on the bridge, and make the roadway wide in proportion, so as to be quite safe, because a little waste of s.p.a.ce on the river is no loss, but your wide embankment at the side loses good ground; and so my picturesque bridges are right as well as beautiful, and I hope to see them built again some day, instead of the frightful straight-backed things which we fancy are fine, and accept from the pontifical rigidities of the engineering mind.
[249] I cannot waste s.p.a.ce here by reprinting what I have said in other books: but the reader ought, if possible, to refer to the notices of this part of our subject in ”Modern Painters,” vol. iv. chap. xviii., and ”Stones of Venice,” vol. iii. chap. i. - 8.