95. Do not allow your personal color-sympathies to dominate your work. All colors have their usefulness, for there are occasions when it is proper they should be used, apart from any question of harmony; one must consider always the uses of colors, the lights, and the purpose of the room under treatment.
96. Nature gives to the dark forest depths great brilliancy of floriculture, and dark-skinned people indulge unconsciously the same bright scale of color. But as we come out of the forest and advance in civilization we use barbaric colorings more discriminately.
97. We employ gold, orange or yellow for the north room not for inherent beauty, but for the sense of warmth which they convey to an atmosphere chilled by the absence of sunlight. We employ receding colors in a small room that the room may look larger. We employ cold colors in a sunny room, especially in the summer home, for reasons psychological rather than æsthetic.
PERIOD USES OF COLOR
98. If our furniture is white and gold, it is clearly evident that the colorings of a room should be soft and harmonious. If we adopt the dark teakwood of India or the deep brown of Flanders, our color scheme again changes. The preponderance of white in Colonial rooms was due to architectural conditions. White illuminates; and in the days when our ceilings were no higher than seven and a half feet, and our windows were small, the room needed an artificial light, and white supplied this.
99. In furnishing an Empire room, the decorators have, little by little, led themselves to believe that what is known as Empire green is a distinct shade of green. On the contrary, green was used in the period of the Empire simply because it was in pleasing contrast with the mahogany and brass so much used. If the mahogany is dark, a dark green is desirable; if light, a light green.
100. Egyptian decoration was full of gold and brilliant coloring, and a popular form of combination was the triad form: