ON COLOUR.
Colour, perhaps, is one of the most expressive languages we possess—the easiest understood by all.
'Style in painting,' says Sir Joshua Reynolds, 'is, the same as in writing, a power over materials, whether words or colours, by which conceptions or sentiments are conveyed.
'When an opportunity offers, paint your studies, instead of drawing them. This will give you such a facility in using colours, that in time they will arrange themselves under the pencil.
'If painting comprises both drawing and colouring, and if, by a short struggle of resolute industry, the same expedition is attainable in painting as in drawing on paper, I cannot see what objection can justly be made to the practice, or why that should be done in parts which may be done altogether.
'Of all branches of the Art, Colouring is the least mechanical.' We cannot measure colour by lines as we can drawing.
Art is not a thing merely to be admired, and with which the spectator has nothing to do, however much he may suppose it: he has perhaps, unconsciously, as much to do with it as it may have to do with him. A man, wholly regardless of art, will remember having seen a picture twenty years ago, when shown him again: its influence on his memory, his taste, or his passions, could alone effect this.
'Colouring,' says Mr. Burnet, 'must either add to, or diminish the effect of any work upon the imagination; it must add to it by increasing, or diminish it by destroying the deception.' And he farther quotes this passage from Addison: 'We cannot, indeed, have a single image in the fancy that did not make its first entrance through the sight; but we have the power of retaining, altering, and compounding those images, which we have once received, into all the varieties of picture and vision that are most agreeable to the imagination.'
'We can form no idea of colouring beyond what has an existence in nature. From this source all our materials must be drawn.' And again:—'The artist must never forget that the mind is composed of ideas received from early impressions, from perceptions frequently occurring, and from reflections founded on such perceptions. Painting can reach the mind only through the medium of the eye, which must be gratified sufficiently to interest it in the communication.'