III
ON COLOUR
One may say broadly that if drawing is the intellectual side of art—it is understood that I refer to the art of painting—colour is the emotional side. This is not a hard and fast distinction. It is impossible to make one where the two qualities are so intimately connected; but colour has an effect in echoing or waking our feelings that drawing alone has not. This is perhaps because colours themselves, even if placed in simple tints without definite form, suggest to us correspondences with the colours and effects of things in nature. Thus blue suggests the sky; white and yellow, light; red, fire or blood; green suggests the fields and trees; and dark colours the night. One feels this emotional correspondence with some aspect of nature, or something recognisable in nature, in every tint of the palette.
The rules of drawing are fairly definite, and we may claim to know what constitutes good and accurate drawing; but it is not at all easy to define in what good colouring consists. One cannot go further than say that it must be harmonious, and that it must convey the impression of truth to nature. One can tell bad colouring at once—that the colours are untrue or discordant; but the limits within which good colour is possible are as wide as the range of emotion or temperament in man. Any artist will paint things as he sees or feels them. If he has succeeded in expressing some truth or beauty, it will be recognised and felt by some among the many who will in time see his work.
Nothing in nature is actually the colour that we see it. It only appears to us at a given moment as a particular colour in relation to other apparent colours which surround it. Thus we may walk out on a rainy evening when the sky and everything is grey, and come indoors and light the lamp, and immediately the sky which we see through the window appears as a beautiful and tender blue, though there was no trace of blue in the sky a minute before, when we were outside. The change is produced in our senses by the colour of the sky taking its place in relation to a range of warm colours in the lighted room. In the same way the presence of a man with a lantern, or a light in a window, will apparently change the colour of things in its neighbourhood, and a mass of any strong colour, such as red, blue, or orange, will suggest its complementary colour in surrounding objects. (There is a curious exception to this in the case of lilac or bright violet, which, instead of suggesting its complementary colour in surrounding things, appears to diffuse its own colour over them, so that we seem to see a suspicion of violet in all other neighbouring colours.)
We must realise, then, that each combination of colours we see presents and forms a problem of its own. I think this was a difficulty not present to the older painters, who—perhaps wisely—seem to have ruled out, or not troubled about, many subtleties that worry us.
The range of colour that we possess—from white to black—has been proved sufficient to express the utmost range of colour or light in nature, from the sun itself in the sky to the deepest gloom. Yet our range of pigments is nothing like as wide as the range in nature from light to shadow. It is wide enough to enable us to paint, to the point of absolute illusion, an object receiving light in a room; but not with actual light added. For example, one might paint the portrait of a man, with a white shirtfront in full light, which would be white, or nearly so. But if he wore a diamond stud, the light from this—a reflection of the sky—would be much too bright for our colours. In such a case it would become necessary to sacrifice the stud, or to paint the man and the shirt down to it. It would become a question for the painter which thing he considered the most important, and in this way either a light or a dark version of the man might be true, and both might be equally beautiful, but on different grounds. One may imagine this difference of point of view between Millais and Whistler in their portraits. The same kind of question arises if we paint a landscape—whether to sacrifice the ground for the sky, or the sky for the ground, or both for figures, if we introduce them; and the solution is the same—that the colour of the particular part one wishes to be the principal must determine the colour of the secondary things.
We can consider the tints of our palette to be like the notes on a keyboard, and, in looking at nature, try and resolve its appearances into a series of tints in some correspondence with what we know from experience our colours will produce. Thus, in looking at a scene, one would say: “The general tone of the whole is so-and-so—warm, or cold, or whatever it may be; the highest light is so-and-so, and the darkest dark is so-and-so,” and having made up our mind on the general aspect and limits of our problem, get to work on it in detail.
This is the ordinary way one would begin in studying from nature in colour. Now we go on. The scale of colour may be divided into warm and cold colours, and all colours we see in nature incline either to warm or cold—I am presuming we are making a study from nature—not only in themselves, but according to the degree in which they are influenced by light. We shall, I think, never find light and shadow on an object equally warm or equally cool. This would be a monochrome, like an etching or an engraving, which suggests colour, but does not give it; and those engravings best suggest colour which are printed in black or neutral tints, and not in a positive colour, for our imagination supplies the colour if the gradations are right. But in ordinary daylight in a room the lights are cool, and the shadows are warm in colour. So, out of doors in warm sunshine, we get the lights warm and the shadows cool, even to the point of absolute blue or violet. This brings me to one of the difficulties of outdoor painting—the tendency, especially if sunlight be attempted, to paint in too cold a key, so that a study which, at the time we were engaged on it seemed absolutely true, should afterwards, when brought into the even light of a room, fail to give the impression of warmth that the original scene gave. We often see pictures of sunshine painted which give us no impression whatever of warmth.
I think the reason of this is that we do not realise how warm the colour of the light is, being enveloped in it, perhaps even having it on our work—at anyrate, having our eyes filled with it. We are struck by the sharp contrast of the cool shadow, and paint that, it being obviously cool. But if we concede that the light is warm, we can get the opposition of the cool shadow, and get it to look blue, or almost so, even though as pigment it may be umber and white, or grey. A difficulty of the same kind is felt with regard to the blue of the sky, which, under some effects, appears as blue as one can possibly make it—bluer, even—and at the same time warm. We may pile on our brightest blue as much as we like, we cannot get it blue enough, and we cannot at the same time get it warm. Now, we know that the bright blues of our palette, when we look at them in a room, are bright enough to give the sense of any conceivable blue; so we may conclude that the fault does not lie in our paints, but in ourselves, as not knowing how to manage them, and that we must try and make the blue look more blue by accenting the complementary colours and painting the ground and surroundings warmer—i.e. by painting the whole picture in a warmer key.
There is the danger, of course, of going over to the other extreme, but of the two it is better to err on the side of warmth than of coldness; and I think that probably one reason of the fineness of colour of the Venetians is that they had the possible blue of the sky in their minds, if not in their pictures, as a key and point of contrast with their other colours. But doubtless the main reason was the situation and importance of Venice, and its relations with the East; which gave its artists the finest possible opportunities of studying colour. People of all races were there, dressed in fine and varied colours, and moving among beautiful buildings, with the sea and sky for background; and the Venetian artists had this fine show daily before their eyes, under all conditions of lighting. All the possibilities of colour would become familiar to them, and we can understand how the influence of their surroundings led them to their great results.
If we aim at getting the utmost fulness of colour in the lights, as the Venetians did, the limited range of our colours makes this impossible in the darks. It becomes necessary, then, to keep all the darks together, treating them very broadly. You will find the old painters were never afraid of strong darks or dark shadows. Sir Joshua Reynolds advises that in a picture the shadows should be all of one colour; or, at least, he says, they should appear to be of one colour, meaning that the eye should not rest on nor question them. And though the old pictures impress one as being darker than nature,—and so, in the sense of the general colour of nature, untrue,—yet in themselves and within their conditions they give a true impression of nature.
We have not the opportunity of studying fine colours that the old painters had; our life goes on in more sombre dress. Still, there is fine colour to be seen wherever the sun shines, here as elsewhere, and of late years the search for the fulness of colour, with light, has led artists to the furthest limits of the palette, and the most violent means, in endeavouring to get the range and force of colour in the shadows as well as in the lights, so that we find pictures painted in spots of pure pigment placed side by side, the intention being that they should fuse together in the eye of the spectator. But the result is not successful; it is distressing to the eye, and, I think, shows that something must be sacrificed at one end of the scale or the other. And yet, if we paint in a very high key, in simple tints, I question if we are not in some danger of starving our colour for the sake of keeping our pictures light. White paint will not of itself express light, but only by contrast with dark.
To get colour and light is the great thing. The difficulty is to get them both. Turner, in his Italian landscapes, enhanced the colour of his sky by a dark pine-tree in the foreground, sacrificing the colour of the tree for the sake of accenting its value and warmth; and the old landscape painter’s device of a brown tree is used for the same end—to make the blue of the sky and distance more luminous and beautiful. This is also the reason for the dark-brown foreground usual in old landscapes; and our eye is not arrested by the tree or the dark foreground, but goes past it to the point of the picture.
Rembrandt, in his colouring, seems to have avoided blue altogether, gaining the sense of it by the opposition of golden-brown to grey. The secret of his wonderful colour is difficult to read. A passing impression of one of his pictures is of a work all in golden-brown, with fine reds and strong blacks. But when one has looked long enough at it to get into the picture, as it were, this sense of a particular colour disappears, and we feel ourselves in presence of the actual scene, with its air, colour, and light.
I do not think we should try and imitate the colour of the old painters, though we can, by study, see in nature the indications of, and perhaps the reasons for, their method of work. It would be hopeless, for instance, for anyone to try and imitate Rembrandt’s colouring; and probably Rembrandt himself would be unable to explain his method, but would simply say, “I saw it so,” or “I wished to express a particular sentiment.”
There is the question of quality of colour—another difficult thing to define, though we recognise it readily. It does not seem to depend on truth of relations, or even on truth of colour, for a picture may be true in colour and yet the paint itself may be bad in quality—opaque, heavy, or showing much labour. But there is fine quality of colour in works differing as much from each other in method as Rembrandt and the Primitives, as Raphael and Franz Hals, as Velasquez and Titian. It means that the work impresses one as having clearness, freshness, and that, in short, the impression is produced of nature, and not of paint.
There are two methods of painting, and good quality of colour can be achieved by either. One method is that of simple and direct painting—that we put down the right colour at once with fresh, untroubled paint, as in a sketch, and we know how often there is greater charm in a sketch than in a finished work. This is the method of Hals, of Velasquez, of Moroni, and of most moderns. The other method is the elaborate one of preparing an underpainting, more or less of the nature of monochrome, with reference only to the drawing and massing of light and shade, and then painting by thin glazes, or by working over thin glazes with the right colours, the under colours showing through, and giving a richness and transparency. I think we see this in the work of Rubens and of Titian, though, of course, we nearly always see both direct and glazed colour in the same work, as in that most marvellous head by Rembrandt, of himself as an old man, in the National Gallery. The object of underpainting and glazing is, of course, to retain the freshness which is so easily lost in oil painting, if the same colour is painted over and over; especially as when half-dry, or if much medium is used, it becomes muddy: stiff colour stands fairly well.
Another object of underpainting is the determining of the design in light and dark. All paint changes a little, lowers a little, with time; and if a picture has no strong arrangement of light and dark, but depends for its beauty on subtle delicacies and differences of value, these are often lost in a few years through the flattening down of the paint; while if there is a strong backbone, as it were, of light and shade beneath the colour, the picture will always be effective, and the main features remain, in spite of any little changes.
The painter has to make the quality of his paint in oil-colour. If you compare oil- with water-colour you will see what I mean; for if you put a simple wash of colour on paper it is always beautiful, because of its transparency, and it is difficult to lose this quality in water-colour; but it is difficult to get it in oil, and still more difficult to retain it throughout a work.
Good quality is a measure of the painter’s perception. Two men will paint a plain blue sky, using, perhaps, the same pigment. One man will give you the actual sense of the sky and the air, and the other nothing but blue paint. The difference between them is that one man had perception of the quality of the sky, and the other had not. So, when we see a good quality in paint, we know that it means not only niceness of hand and perception, but great knowledge and judgment in the artist. It all comes back to the same old story—that we must work, and cultivate our perceptions.
I have spoken of the emotional power of colour—i.e. the power which colours in themselves have in inducing a mood—as an important element in painting. The sad, golden tone of Rembrandt seems to strike the keynote of his sentiment, and to bring us into his frame of mind before we realise his subject. In the same way, the rich reds and warm colours of Titian, Rubens, and Reynolds produce in our minds the sense of activity, richness, and splendour, quite irrespective of the drawing or modelling of their figures, or their meaning.
If they had painted their figures as they would look in the cold light of a studio, this effect would not have been produced.
The picture of Admiral Keppel by Reynolds, in the present Old Masters Exhibition, is painted in a clear grey key of daylight—a realistic effect, as anyone might see it; and one may infer from this that in those instances where Reynolds darkened down his pictures with rich warm glazes, it was done designedly, in order to produce an effect by the means of colour.
I think, then, that we may conclude in these cases—I may mention as an example an “Adoration of the Magi,” by Filippino Lippi, in the National Gallery, where red and gold and other rich colours are pushed to their extreme power—that painters deliberately employed the emotional power of colour, as colour, quite apart from any immediate resemblance to nature, in order to produce an effect on the mood of the spectator. And it must be the most difficult thing of all in painting, to do this so as to include general truth of resemblance.
But these paths are outside the track of most artists to-day. Our efforts are not so much directed to imaginative subjects, as to actualities, and our endeavour is to find and express the beauty which exists among us. We are more literal, less imaginative; and this enhancing of nature by the power of colour is beyond us. We feel that it may be possible to paint with our first and main reference to nature as we see it around us, and, while trying to understand what has been done, to claim still that beauty of colour may be found also in the plain aspect of visible things even to-day.
It is for this reason, I think, that the art of Velasquez specially appeals to us. In it the ordinary aspects of nature are found to be not inconsistent with the finest art. There is nothing conventional in his colour. It is simply like that of nature, and I think that none but artists, or those who have studied the appearance of nature, can quite understand the intense admiration his work excites. It is not, as in the case of Titian and the colourists, an emotion produced by colour, as colour, taking us beyond our ordinary sensations; but it gives us something of the pleasure of a surprise, in finding and recognising that such beautiful modulations of colour are apparent under ordinary conditions. Velasquez is sometimes, perhaps rightly, called unemotional, because his colour is not prearranged to influence us, but is, as it were, an impartial statement, as contrasted with the work of those painters who pushed the emotional power of colour to its extreme limit.
As I hope to consider the work of Velasquez later, I will not touch further on it now, but may mention one or two men of kindred spirit. Chardin, the French painter, gives us very beautiful colour in his still-life paintings in the Louvre, and there is one in the National Gallery. We are shown, not what beautiful things are painted, but how beautiful they appear under the influence of light. The effect of one colour on another, the harmony of the different tints produced by light on a few simple things—these things may be seen in his work; as also in the work of Edouard Manet, who had much the same feeling as Velasquez for the beauty of colour in simple, cool lighting, and expressed it with a directness of vision and execution (being able by a true eye to strike the tint at once) that gives his colour a very great charm.
The splendid work of Sir John Millais—the “North-West Passage” and the “Yeomen of the Guard,” for example—appeal to us in the same way, as fine painting and fine colour, apart from the interest of the subject. And that great artist who died recently—Mr. Whistler—has not only given us the example of a fine and simple method in painting, but has shown us more fully than any other artist the modulations of colour by light. In his portraits, with their fine realisation of the effects of atmosphere on colour, and in his pictures of twilight and of night, he has recorded effects which no artist before him had attempted. We can all see these things now, and how beautiful they are, but Mr. Whistler was the one who showed us. He was, I think, the one artist since Turner who has extended the range of the artist’s vision in the direction of revealing to us the beauty of colour as it appears in nature.
I have already spoken of the painter’s main difficulty—in determining the proper relation of parts to the whole—in the matter of lighting and arrangement of his picture. This is also the main difficulty in colouring, and the only solution I can give you is that you should, at least once, endeavour to have the scene you are painting—if it is of such a nature that you can do this—actually before you, and to consider it as a whole, taking in the whole scene as comprehensively as possible; and so you can judge the effect of one colour against another, and see which colour strikes you most unmistakably, and so gives the keynote to the rest. We should study in the same way anything we happen to see that strikes us as having the material for a picture.
Truth or beauty of colour is the main thing in a picture. It is, in fact, the only thing that gives a picture a high place among the masterpieces. A picture that is well drawn and modelled only will interest, but will be passed by in favour of colour. For colour touches us more deeply; its sense is more instinctive. A child will be excited by colours, but indifferent to form. We all, artists or not, have some latent memory or mental image, which is called forth in us when we look at a picture, and recognise, or fail to recognise, nature in it; not, I think, so much by our memories of form, as by our memories of the colour and general appearance of nature.
We can only see what we have learned to look for. An uneducated person will consider a face in a picture beautiful if it has bright eyes, pink cheeks, and red lips; or a landscape beautiful if it also presents him with the obvious facts. It will be enough for him; it is as much as he sees in nature. But Nature does not reveal her beauties unsought, and the study of paintings by those who are not artists is not only an education, but an added pleasure to their lives, enlarging and directing their minds, so that they learn to detect and appreciate beauties in nature to which they would otherwise have been blind.