The expression “seeing colour” used to puzzle me. I was aware that some
painters made their pictures more pleasing in colour than others and more
like the colour of the actual thing as a whole, still there were any
number of bits of brilliant colour in their work which for the life of me
I could not see in nature. I used to hear people say of a man who got
pleasing and natural colour, “Does he not see colour well?” and I used to
say he did, but, as far as I was concerned, it would have been more true
to say that he put down colour which he did not see well, or at any rate
that he put down colour which I could not see myself.
In course of time I got to understand that seeing colour does not mean
inventing colour, or exaggerating it, but being on the look out for it,
thus seeing it where another will not see it, and giving it the
preference as among things to be preserved and rendered amid the
wholesale slaughter of innocents which is inevitable in any painting.
Painting is only possible as a quasi-hieroglyphic epitomising of nature;
this means that the half goes for the whole, whereon the question arises
which half is to be taken and which made to go? The colourist will
insist by preference on the coloured half, the man who has no liking for
colour, however much else he may sacrifice, will not be careful to
preserve this and, as a natural consequence, he will not preserve it.
Good, that is to say, pleasing, beautiful, or even pretty colour cannot
be got by putting patches of pleasing, beautiful or pretty colour upon
one’s canvas and, which is a harder matter, leaving them when they have
been put. It is said of money that it is more easily made than kept and
this is true of many things, such as friendship; and even life itself is
more easily got than kept. The same holds good of colour. It is also
true that, as with money, more is made by saving than in any other way,
and the surest way to lose colour is to play with it inconsiderately, not
knowing how to leave well alone. A touch of pleasing colour should on no
account be stirred without consideration.
That we can see in a natural object more colour than strikes us at a
glance, if we look for it attentively, will not be denied by any who have
tried to look for it. Thus, take a dull, dead, level, grimy old London
wall: at a first glance we can see no colour in it, nothing but a more or
less purplish mass, got, perhaps as nearly as in any other way, by a tint
mixed with black, Indian red and white. If, however, we look for colour
in this, we shall find here and there a broken brick with a small surface
of brilliant crimson, hard by there will be another with a warm orange
hue perceivable through the grime by one who is on the look out for it,
but by no one else. Then there may be bits of old advertisement of which
here and there a gaily coloured fragment may remain, or a rusty iron hook
or a bit of bright green moss; few indeed are the old walls, even in the
grimiest parts of London, on which no redeeming bits of colour can be
found by those who are practised in looking for them. To like colour, to
wish to find it, and thus to have got naturally into a habit of looking
for it, this alone will enable a man to see colour and to make a note of
it when he has seen it, and this alone will lead him towards a pleasing
and natural scheme of colour in his work.
Good colour can never be got by putting down colour which is not seen; at
any rate only a master who has long served accuracy can venture on
occasional inaccuracy—telling a lie, knowing it to be a lie, and as, _se
non vera_, _ben trovata_. The grown man in his art may do this, and
indeed is not a man at all unless he knows how to do it daily and hourly
without departure from the truth even in his boldest lie; but the child
in art must stick to what he sees. If he looks harder he will see more,
and may put more, but till he sees it without being in any doubt about
it, he must not put it. There is no such sure way of corrupting one’s
colour sense as the habitual practice of putting down colour which one
does not see; this and the neglecting to look for it are equal faults.
The first error leads to melodramatic vulgarity, the other to torpid
dullness, and it is hard to say which is worse.
It may be said that the preservation of all the little episodes of colour
which can be discovered in an object whose general effect is dingy and
the suppression of nothing but the uninteresting colourless details
amount to what is really a forcing and exaggeration of nature, differing
but little from downright fraud, so far as its effect goes, since it
gives an undue preference to the colour side of the matter. In equity,
if the exigencies of the convention under which we are working require a
sacrifice of a hundred details, the majority of which are uncoloured,
while in the minority colour can be found if looked for, the sacrifice
should be made _pro rata_ from coloured and uncoloured alike. If the
facts of nature are a hundred, of which ninety are dull in colour and ten
interesting, and the painter can only give ten, he must not give the ten
interesting bits of colour and neglect the ninety soberly coloured
details. Strictly, he should sacrifice eighty-one sober details and nine
coloured ones; he will thus at any rate preserve the balance and relation
which obtain in nature between coloured and uncoloured.
This, no doubt, is what he ought to do if he leaves the creative, poetic
and more properly artistic aspect of his own function out of the
question; if he is making himself a mere transcriber, holding the mirror
up to nature with such entire forgetfulness of self as to be rather
looking-glass than man, this is what he must do. But the moment he
approaches nature in this spirit he ceases to be an artist, and the
better he succeeds as painter of something that might pass for a coloured
photograph, the more inevitably must he fail to satisfy, or indeed to
appeal to us at all as poet—as one whose sympathies with nature extend
beyond her superficial aspect, or as one who is so much at home with her
as to be able readily to dissociate the permanent and essential from the
accidental which may be here to-day and gone to-morrow. If he is to come
before us as an artist, he must do so as a poet or creator of that which
is not, as well as a mirror of that which is. True, experience in all
kinds of poetical work shows that the less a man creates the better, that
the more, in fact, he makes, the less is he of a maker; but experience
also shows that the course of true nature, like that of true love, never
does run smooth, and that occasional, judicious, slight departures from
the actual facts, by one who knows the value of a lie too well to waste
it, bring nature more vividly and admirably before us than any amount of
adherence to the letter of strict accuracy. It is the old story, the
letter killeth but the spirit giveth life.
With colour, then, he who does not look for it will begin by not seeing
it unless it is so obtrusive that there is no escaping it; he will
therefore, in his rendering of the hundred facts of nature above referred
to, not see the ten coloured bits at all, supposing them to be, even at
their brightest, somewhat sober, and his work will be colourless or
disagreeable in colour. The faithful copyist, who is still a mere
copyist, will give nine details of dull uninteresting colour and one of
interesting. The artist or poet will find some reason for slightly
emphasising the coloured details and will scatter here and there a few
slight, hardly perceptible, allusions to more coloured details than come
within the letter of his bond, but will be careful not to overdo it. The
vulgar sensational painter will force in his colour everywhere, and of
all colourists he must be pronounced the worst.
Briefly then, to see colour is simply to have got into a habit of not
overlooking the patches of colour which are seldom far to seek or hard to
see by those who look for them. It is not the making one’s self believe
that one sees all manner of colours which are not there, it is only the
getting oneself into a mental habit of looking out for episodes of
colour, and of giving them a somewhat undue preference in the struggle
for rendering, wherever anything like a reasonable pretext can be found
for doing so. For if a picture is to be pleasing in colour, pleasing
colours must be put upon the canvas, and reasons have got to be found for
putting them there. [1886.]
P.S.—The foregoing note wants a great deal of reconsideration for which I
cannot find time just now. Jan. 31, 1898.