Color problems

After having carried the study of color as far as the limits of our plan allow, a few simple, practical suggestions may not come amiss.

Students of painting and design will find Rood’s many experiments with colors in his Modern Chromatics minute and valuable, especially those on the effects of mixing paints and their consequent loss of luminosity. If their time for the scientific study of color be limited, Colour, by Church, is well adapted for their purpose, being small, clear, and admirably illustrated. It gives briefly the gist of what has been written heretofore on the subject.

Burnet, in Colour in Painting, is helpful on the artistic side. He says, “Harmony arising from the reflection of one color upon the adjoining, so as to produce a blending and union of the several hues, has been practised with the greatest success by many of the Dutch school, producing a chain of connections between the two extremes of hot and cold.”

As to materials for painting, Church’s Chemistry of Paints and Painting gives much useful information as to their substance, permanence, adulteration, and effect upon one another. Recollecting, as we do from experiments with Maxwell’s disks, that neutral colors are simply any one of the six colors diluted or changed by black or white, or black and white, or other colors, it is interesting to know that an ingeniously illustrated book, published in Paris by E. Guichard, La Grammaire de la Couleur, gives abundant examples of neutral colors, and printed beside them samples of the colors of which they are made. The author suggests that in embroidery any of these combinations can be made by twisting together threads of each of the colors required to make the neutral color, as by Plates CXVI and CXVII.

In the matter of the choice of draperies and any kind of still life to be used to paint from, one of our leading artists advised his pupils generally to select old things as being usually finer than new ones, because age mellows and refines colors; and also that objects of one country harmonize better with each other than those of different countries, and those of one period of one country still better.

Florists, gardeners, and fruit-dealers will find a large part of Chevreul’s book devoted to color as applied to horticulture, with notes of his experiments in the arrangement of plants and flowers.

While other nations love flowers and use and cultivate them, the Japanese, along with their great skill in growing them, have elaborated an art of arranging them, of which art a full and clear account, admirably illustrated, is given in The Flowers of Japan, and the Art of Floral Arrangement, a recent work published in Tokio. Many features of this art are very attractive, and much can be learned from them even if we do not wish to carry it to the same extent of form and ceremony. They make much of common flowers, and while our admiration is mainly given to the blossoms, they value every part of the plant, using stem, leaf, and bud in their arrangements so as to display each to advantage, with the flower as the crowning beauty of the whole. The author writes, “The arrangement of flowers has always been regarded in Japan as an occupation befitting learned men and literati. Ladies of the aristocracy have practised it, as they have other arts, but it is by no means considered as an effeminate accomplishment. Priests, philosophers, and men of rank who have retired from public life have been its most enthusiastic followers. Various virtues are attributed to professors of the art, who are considered to belong to a sort of aristocracy of talent, enjoying privileges of rank and precedence in society to which they are not by birth entitled. A religious spirit, selfdenial, gentleness, and forgetfulness of cares are some of the virtues said to follow from a habitual practice of the art of arrangement of flowers.”^[14]

The fact that flowers usually make a focus wherever they may be placed,—on a table, in a room, or in a landscape,—on account of their comparative purity and luminosity of color, increases their beauty and shows the skill of the person who arranges them, but there is also a corresponding disadvantage that if discord there be, the arrangement is all the more prominent, the eye being called to it immediately.

While we speak of the “comparative purity and luminosity” of colors we may at the same time quote from one of a series of interesting articles by F. Schuyler Matthews:^[15]

“Even our anxiety to obtain definite names for definite colors is completely overshadowed by the stronger wish to understand the secret of their harmonious relationship.

“Now let us try to discover if we can some small portion of this secret. Why is it that nature nearly always puts yellow stamens in her white flowers? Why is it that nearly all of her white flowers are not a colorless pure white? Why is it difficult for us to find a positively blue or positively yellow flower? What is the reason that there is such a multitude, such an infinity of color tones in the flowers, on the earth, over the sea, in the sky, everywhere? What a perplexing, changeable, evasive thing the whole world of color is! What is the reason of it all? Simply this: Nature abhors the commonplace—she despises crude red, yellow, and blue. Variety she will have; harmony she insists upon; positivism she only employs to emphasize her love of the infinite. Thus we have one rather questionably perfect yellow marigold and a dozen others which have more orange in them than yellow; one scarlet-lake colored gladiolus and an infinity of red roses, which cannot be called anything which is an approach to the pure red color which scarlet-lake nearest resembles. We have the forget-me-not, which is nearly a true blue, but we have a host of so-called blue flowers, every one of which has barely fifty per cent. of the true sky blue in its composition.”

It seems as though in the face of these facts it would be hardly possible to designate any special flowers which possess the prismatic colors in an absolutely pure form.

The rules for making harmonies can be made to apply to the arrangements of gardens, shop windows, bouquets and other decorations, as well as to the catalogues of florists, etc. A recently issued catalogue strikes a true color chord in its cover. It shows a bunch of sweet peas and leaves of agreeable colors well balanced by the background of pale neutralized green, thus making a true and tempting harmony to lovers of flowers and color.

Salesmen and women would be helped in their line of work by studying particularly the qualities of colors, and the effect on them of different kinds of artificial light. Knowledge of the contrasts of color will help greatly in showing goods to advantage, as one color may be made to heighten the color of another, and counters and shop windows may be well arranged according to the rules given for different classes of harmonies.

Women in their dress, embroidery, and house decorations have immense opportunities; no art is finer or higher for a woman however placed than that of being a harmonious whole herself, and of making or adding to a harmonious home, in which the unconscious influence of good color holds a large share. To do this it must not be thought that much money is necessary; it adds, of course, to the ability of choice among fine goods, but cheap materials of good colors wisely combined may produce a far happier, we may even say healthier, result, than an unlimited purse without knowledge and taste. This is difficult to overestimate. No woman has a right to say she has no influence, conscious or unconscious, on the world around her. Does not much of the influence for good or ill come from a woman’s dress? It may be cheap, it may be plain, but it should be, and can be, in good taste and in harmony with the character and position of the person who wears it, and knowledge of one’s own coloring and of that suited to it is one of the most important details.

Women in their dress, milliners and dressmakers, would do well to realize that a dress or bonnet may be good in color in itself, when it is a whole, but when worn it becomes only part of a whole and will be harmonious and becoming, or inharmonious and unbecoming, as it does, or does not, suit the coloring of the wearer. To wear anything simply because it is beautiful is unwise; it should first of all be suitable. Study of the law of contrast of color will here help immensely.

For instance, according to that law, red and yellow next to each other make the yellow seem more yellow, the red more red, so if a woman with a sallow, colorless complexion wears pink roses or pink ribbons, the yellow in her skin is intensified and the small amount of pink in her cheeks is lost. As blue is the complement of yellow, a bright blue will have a still worse effect, but let her try a shade of not too intense yellow; the skin will seem to lose its yellow, and whatever pink there may be will be brought out by the contrast. So other peculiarities may be softened or increased by contrast or harmony of color. White hair is made to seem whiter by the contrast of black or a very dark color; black hair and rosy cheeks are made more brilliant by a white surrounding; delicate blonde coloring will be made insipid and colorless by too strong colors, and a plain face may be made attractive by surrounding it with harmonizing coloring.