Fields Chromatography | Page 3

had been good colourists, among the thousands who had laboured to become such. But there is reason to hope that as Zeuxis succeeded and excelled Polygnotus, and Titian Raphael, the artists of Britain will transcend all preceding schools in the chromatic department of painting. It is even probable that they may surpass them in all other branches, and in every mode and application of the art, as they have already more particularly done in an original and unrivalled use of water-colours.
Happily, too, there has arisen among us a school of colouring that confirms this expectation, strengthened as it is, by the suitableness of our climate to perfect vision. For in it we have that mean degree of light which is best adapted to the distinguishing of colours, a boundless diversity of hue in nature relieved by those fine effects of light and shade which are denied to more vertical suns, besides those beauties of complexion and feature in our females peculiar to England; respects in which at least our country is not unfavourable to art.
Even now it is urged by some to the disparagement of the British school, that it excels in colouring; as if this were incompatible with any other excellence, or as if nature, the great prototype of art, ever dispensed with it. The graphic branches of painting, owe everything to colour, which, if it does not constitute a picture, is its flesh and blood. Without it, the finest performances remain lifeless skeletons, and yield no pleasure. Painting is the art of representing visible things by light, shade, form, and colour; but of these, colour--and colour alone--is the immediate object which attracts the eye. Colouring is, therefore, the first requisite--the one thing imparting warmth and life--the chief quality engaging attention; in short, the best introduction to a picture, and that which continues to give it value so long as it is regarded. It is a power, too, which is with the most difficulty retained, being the first to leave the artist himself, and the first to quit a school on its decline. Graphic art without colouring, is as food without flavour; and it was the deficiency of colouring in the great works of the Roman and Florentine schools that caused Sir Joshua Reynolds to confess a certain want of attraction in them. To relish and estimate truly their greatness, required, he said, a forced and often-repeated attention, and "it was only those persons incapable of appreciating such divine performances, who made pretensions to instantaneous raptures on first beholding them." Gainsborough also, with a candour similar to that of Reynolds, upon viewing the cartoons at Hampton Court, acknowledged that their beauty was of a class he could neither appreciate nor enjoy.
Colouring, then, is a necessity; but there is in it a vicious extreme; that in which it is rendered so principal as, by want of subordination, to overlay the subject. There is also a negative excellence which consists in not always employing pleasing tints, but of sometimes taking advantage of the effects to be derived from impure hues, as Poussin did in his "Deluge." In this work, neither black nor white, blue, red, nor yellow appears; the whole mass being, with little variation, of a sombre grey, the true resemblance of a dark and humid atmosphere, by which every object is rendered indistinct and almost colourless. This absence of colour, however, is a merit, and not a fault. Vandyke employed such means with admirable effect in the background of a Crucifixion, and in his Pieta; and the Pha?ton of Giulio Romano is celebrated for a suffusion of smothered red, which powerfully excites the idea of a world on fire.
Of the rank and value of this department of painting, there will be, as there has been, difference of judgment and opinion, as there is variety in the powers of the eye and understanding. But take from Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, and other distinguished masters, the estimation of their colouring, and we fear all that is left to them would hardly preserve their names from oblivion. 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. For him, in truth, colour is as equally diffused as light, spreading itself over the entire face of nature, and clothing the whole world with beauty.
CHAPTER II.
ON THE RELATIONS AND HARMONY OF COLOUR.
Assured as we