The sense of color is so lost to painters, as well as to laymen, that to talk of color compositions as one speaks of sound compositions is to challenge doubt and occasion surprise. And yet there is a music of color even as there is a music of sound, and there should be a delight in color composition even as there is a delight in sound composition; and this delight should be something fundamentally distinct from any interest in the subject of the composition. The subject may be a man, or a woman, or a field, or a tree, or a wave, or a cloud, or just nothing at all—mere masses or streaks of color; the perfection or the imperfection of the color arrangement remains the same.
That the color-sense is lost to laymen, critics, and painters is evidenced by the ridicule that for thirty years was heaped upon Whistler for calling his pictures “harmonies,” “symphonies,” “nocturnes,” etc.; for adopting the more or less abstract nomenclature of sound compositions—music—to describe color compositions.
One paper described them as “some figure pieces, which this artist exhibits as ‘harmonies’ in this, that, or the other, being, as they are, mere rubs-in of color, have no claims to be regarded as pictures.” Another says, “A dark bluish surface, with dots on it, and the faintest adumbrations of shape under the darkness, is gravely called a ‘Nocturne in Black and Gold.’” Again, “Two of Mr. Whistler’s ‘color-symphonies,’ a ‘Nocturne in Blue and Gold,’ and a ‘Nocturne in Black and Gold.’ If he did not exhibit these as pictures under peculiar and, what seems to most people, pretentious titles they would be entitled to their due meed of admiration. But they only come one step nearer pictures than delicately graduated tints on a wall-paper do.”
And so in endless iteration and reiteration.
It never occurred to either painters or critics to judge the pictures as if they were in reality so many “delicately graduated tints on a wall-paper.” The color-sense was deficient. The pictures were judged by their composition, their subjects,—or, rather, not appreciated at all, but condemned, on account of their titles, which expressed exactly what the painter desired to convey,—namely, his attempts to produce harmonies in color independently of subject.
So far from Whistler’s titles being absurd, they were so many frank attempts to tell the public what the painter was really trying to do. He might have been more obscure, like many a composer of music, and simply said, “Opus I.,” or “Opus XX.,” and so on. He did call three of his early pictures “Symphony in White, No. I.,” “Symphony in White, No. II.,” and “Symphony in White, No. III.;” but the first, a full-length figure, was also known as the “White Girl” of the “Salon des Refusés,” 1863; the second, a three-quarter length of a young girl in white, standing by a mantel, as “The Little White Girl;” while the third, with no other title, is of two girls in white.
But for the most part he chose to describe each particular work as an arrangement of blue and silver, or black and gray, or flesh-color and brown, according to the predominating tones of the composition, thereby aiding the eye of the observer.
There are beauties of form devoid of color;
There are beauties of color devoid of form;
There are beauties of form and color combined.
Of the foregoing the first is familiar in sculpture, and the third is familiar in painting, but the second is scarcely observed at all, though color without form is found wherever color is used decoratively.
The ordinary house-painter endeavors to secure agreeable effects by the mere arrangement of colors. The interior-decorator endeavors—for the most part with disastrous results—to secure agreeable effects by the mere distribution of color. In a crude way the house-painter, the sign-painter, the decorator, the dyer, the dress-maker, are all color-composers, their object being to produce harmonies in color quite irrespective of line and form. They know nothing about drawing, they know nothing about modelling, but they try to please the eye by color arrangements.