In days long gone by, in Italy during the Renaissance and before, in Greece during the Golden Age, color was enjoyed for the sake of color, regardless of the dictates of nature. If an Italian felt like making a background of blue or gold, he did so; if a Greek felt like painting and gilding his sculpture, he did so, until the Parthenon and its contents must have been gorgeous with color, laid on, not after the precepts of nature, but for the most part arbitrarily, to please the eye.
All decoration begins with nature and ends in convention.
In this progress from birth in the imitation of natural forms and colors to death in the rigidity of a hard and lifeless convention there is a maturity wherein lines and contours and colors play with perfect freedom, original forms and models being absorbed in the finer creations of the imagination.
Ruskin habitually confused the use of color with the painting of light; while in truth there is no necessary connection at all between colorists and lightists,—to coin a word that will very legitimately mark a distinction.
The painting of light is the distinguishing feature of nineteenth-century art, and Turner was the apostle crying in the wilderness of darkness; he was the first to successfully attempt the realization of sunlight. He keyed his palette up with the sun as the objective point, while the Italians who had influenced him had keyed theirs up simply to produce color-effects. They decorated walls and altars and painted pictures—as a potter decorates his earthen bowl—to please the eye.
Although Ruskin habitually speaks of Turner as a colorist, and undoubtedly says a great many fine things concerning color, he did not care at all for color apart from the delineation of form. To him color was useful only as a mode of drawing; in itself it was as nothing at all.
Speaking of his so-called “truths” of color, he says:
“All truths of color sink at once into the second rank. He, therefore, who has neglected a truth of form for a truth of color has neglected a great truth for a less one.
“That color is indeed a most unimportant characteristic of objects will be farther evident on the slightest consideration. The color of plants is constantly changing with the season, and of everything with the quality of light falling on it; but the nature and essence of the thing are independent of these changes. An oak is an oak, whether green with spring or red with winter; a dahlia is a dahlia, whether it be yellow or crimson; and if some monster-hunting botanist should ever frighten the flower blue, still it will be a dahlia; but let one curve of the petals, one groove of the stamens, be wanting, and the flower ceases to be the same.”[38]
“The most convincing proof of the unimportance of color lies in the accurate observation of the way in which any material object impresses itself on the mind. If we look at nature carefully we shall find that her colors are in a state of perpetual confusion and indistinctness, while her forms, as told by light and shade, are invariably clear, distinct, and speaking. The stones and gravel of the bank catch green reflections from the boughs above; the bushes receive grays and yellows from the ground; every hairbreadth of polished surface gives a little bit of the blue sky or the gold of the sun, like a star upon the local color; this local color, changeful and uncertain in itself, is again disguised and modified by the hue of the light or quenched in the gray of the shadow; and the confusion and blending of tint is altogether so great that were we left to find out what objects were by their colors only, we would scarcely in places distinguish the boughs of a tree from the air beyond them or the ground beneath them.”