It has an inherent quality of beauty or historic interest, and there is a definite and distinct reason for our liking it.
But the effect of color is exciting or disturbing, tranquilizing or pleasing, inexplicable and inexpressible, affecting the senses like an appeal to the passions or the appetite. One might as well explain the love of sport, literature, art or vice. The sense of color is a nerve sense, and this sense varies in the individual. We know that colors which are strongest in direct sun rays, like red and orange, arouse the normal senses, while the blues and violets quiet.
Nature provides vast fields of green because favorable in its effects upon humanity. Experiments prove that men of extreme sensibility exposed to the influences of red light finally show excitement which gives muscular development fifty per cent. in excess of the power possessed by the same subject when exposed for the same period under the influences of blue light.
TO DETERMINE THE COLOR SENSE
Color, like music, while subjected to positive rules of harmony, appeals to natures according to the responsiveness of their nerve sense, and the practical decorator in dealing with a customer should discover at the outstart the character of that nerve sense. Some natures respond to the normal colors, barbaric colors. Some respond to the softer tints and are disturbed by the sharper tones. A dulled sense requires sharp contrasts; a quickened sense is satisfied with the soft gray tones. Apart from any question of propriety or environment the individual taste for color must be determined before the individual taste can be pleased.
A demonstration of four examples in color may serve the purpose of determining one’s color sense.
First. Combinations of normal primary and secondary colors, (a) arranged in contrasts, (b) in analogies.
Second. Combinations of tones of the above colors, (a) arranged in contrasts, (b) in analogies.
Third. Combinations of tints of the above colors, (a) arranged in contrasts, (b) in analogies.
Fourth. Combinations of the gray (tertiary) tones of the above colors, (a) arranged in contrasts, (b) in analogies.