While all this may be true, however, the most important question
has not yet been asked. Is truth of color in representative art
the same thing as beauty of color? It might be said that the
whole procedure of the so-called Impressionist school, in fact
the whole trend of the modern treatment of color, took their
identity for granted. Yet we must discriminate. Truth of color
may be truth to the local color of the given objects, alone or
together; in this case we should have to say that beauty did or
did not exist in the picture, according as it did or did not
exist in the original combination. A red hat on a purple chair
would set one's teeth on edge, in model or picture. Secondly,
truth of color may be truth to the modifications of the
enveloping light, and in this case truth would make for beauty.
For the colors of any given scene are in general not colors
which the objects themselves, if isolated, would have, but the
colors which the eye itself is forced to see. The bluish
shadow of an object in bright sunlight (yellowish light) is only
an expression of the law that in the neighborhood of a colored
object we see its complementary color. If such an effect is
reproduced in a picture, it gives the same relief to the eye
which the original effect showed the need of. The eye fatigued
with yellow sees blue; so if the blue is really supplied in the
picture, it is not only true, but on the road to beauty, because
meting the eye's demand. The older methods of painting gave the
local color of an object, with an admixture of white for the
lights, and a warm dark for the shadows; the modern--which had
been touched on, indeed, sporadically, by Perugino and Vermeer,
for instance,--gives in the shadow the complementary color of
the object combined with that of the light falling upon it--all
conditions of favorable stimulation.
Further favorable stimulation of the eye is given in the method
of the Impressionists in treating "values," that is, comparative
relations of light and shade. The real tones of objects
including the sky, light, etc., can never be reproduced. The
older schools, conscious of this, were satisfied to paint in a
scale of correspondence, in which the relative values were
fairly kept. But even by that means, the great differences of
intensity could not be given, for the brightest spot of any
painting is never more than sixty-six times brighter than the
darkest, while the gray sky on a dull rainy day is four hundred
and twenty times brighter than a white painted cross-bar of a
window seen against the sky as background.<1> There were
various ways of combating this difficulty. Rembrandt, for
instance, as Kirschmann tells us, chose the sombre brown tone,
"not out of caprice or an inclination for mystic dreaming
(Fromentin), but because the yellow and orange side of the
color-manifold admits of the greatest number of intervals
between full saturation and the darkest shade." The precursors
of the Impressionists, on the other hand, succeeded in painting
absolute values, confining themselves to a very limited gamut;
for this reason the first landscapes of the school were all
gray-green, dull, cloudy. But Monet did not stop there. He
painted the ABSOLUTE VALUES of objects IN SHADE on a sunny day,
which of course demands the brightest possibilities of the
palette, and got the lighted objects themselves as nearly as
he could,--thus destroying the relative values, but getting an
extraordinary joyous and glowing effect; and one, too, of
unexpected verisimilitude, for it would seem that in a sunlit
scene we are really attentive to the shaded objects alone, and
what becomes of the others does not so much matter. This effect
was made still more possible by the so-called dissociation of
colors,--i.e. the juxtaposing of tints, the blending of which
by the eye gives the desired color, without the loss of
brightness which a mixing of pigments would involve. Thus by
putting touches of black and white side by side, for instance,
a gray results much brighter than could have been otherwise
reached by mixing; or blue and red spots are blended by the
eye to an extraordinarily vivid purple. Thus, by these
methods, using the truth of color in the sense of following
the nature of retinal functioning, Monet and his followers
raised the color scale many degrees in brightness. Now we
have seen that the eye loves light, warmth, strong color-effects,
related to each other in the way that the eye must see them.
Impressionism, as the name of the method just described, makes
it more possible than it had been before to meet the demands
of the eye for light and color, to recover "the innocence of
the eye," in Ruskin's phrase. Truth to the local color of
objects is relatively indifferent, unless that color is
beautiful in itself; truth to the reciprocal relations and
changes of hue is beauty, because it allows for the eye's own
adaptations of its surroundings in the interest of its own
functioning. Thus in this case, and to sum up, truth is
synonymous with beauty, in so far as beauty is constituted by
favorable stimulation of an organ. The further question, how
far this vivid treatment of light is of importance for the
realization of depth and distance, is not here entered on.
<1> Kirschmann, _Univ. of Toronto Studies, Psychol. Series_ No.
4, p. 20.