A Child's Guide to Pictures

by Charles H. Caffin

This fact of reflection and the fact that the so-called angle of reflection is the same as the angle of incidence, or, in other words, the angle at which the light falls upon the object, explains a familiar sight. Have you never seen, late in the afternoon, when the sun is above the horizon, a blaze upon a hill side, so bright that your first thought is it must be a house on fire? You saw it suddenly; and, if you walk a few steps to the right or left, it as suddenly disappears; to reappear, however, when you resume your former position. By this time you know it is not a fire, but the reflection of the sun from some window or tin roof. The light, striking down upon it, glances off, and, as you happen to be in the line of its angle of reflection, strikes you full in the eyes. But move your position, so as to get out of the “line of fire,” and the reflected ray passes you by without attracting your notice.

Here is another example of reflected light, which you yourself can control. Do you remember the fairy Tinker Bell, in “Peter Pan”; how she appeared as a patch of light, dancing over the walls? Very likely when you returned from the theater you made her appear on the walls of your home. As you sat at the breakfast table you picked up a tumbler of water, or a bright bladed knife, and moved it about until it caught the light and tossed it across the room on to the wall, where you could make the fairy hover by gently shaking the glass or knife. On the other hand by changing the position of the glass or knife you could cause her to disappear; to reappear if you wished it, on another part of the wall.

Now after considering the difference between direct and reflected light, let us go back to the blue dress. We were saying, you will remember, that the skirt no longer presented an appearance of uniform hue. For the local color of the material had become affected by the way in which the light reached the folds. On the raised edges the blue appears almost white; in the bottom of the hollows, where no light penetrates, it appears to be almost black. Meanwhile on the sloping edges of the folds there are varying degrees of lighter or darker blue, according as the material approaches nearer to the light, or recedes further from it. In other words, the light strikes the surfaces of the dress at different angles; there are varieties of reflections, and some parts of the skirt are almost entirely removed from the action of the light.

But all this time we have been speaking of light, and yet the subject of this chapter is color. Well, the reason is, that color is light and light is color. If we were shut up in a cellar from which all light was excluded, we should see no color. Our eyes would experience no sensations of sight whatever, and, if we were left there a long time, our eyes, not being used, would probably lose their sense of sight. But, if after we had been in a cellar a little while surrounded by “thick darkness” as the old English expression is—meaning a darkness so opaque that the eye cannot penetrate it—the window shutter should be opened a trifle, then immediately our eyes would experience a sensation of color. The shaft of light, cutting across the darkness, would look white; but, if it hit upon a shelf of apples, our eye would receive a sensation of green or red or yellow. If light is color, why should it seem white in one case and some other hue in another? It is because in the whiteness of light are contained all the colors of which we are conscious. Very likely you know the experiment by which the truth of this is shown. Supposing you are still in the cellar and place in the pathway of the shaft of light a prism—that is to say, a bar of glass not round or square, but triangular—what will happen? The glass being transparent, the light will pass through it. But not in a straight line; for, as it hits one of the sloping surfaces of the prism, it will be bent out of its course; and then, as it reaches the opposite sloping side, it will again be bent into another direction. So the light in its passage through the prism will have been twice bent out of its original direction; and, when it emerges, it will be no longer a single shaft of white light, but will appear as a broad band of many colored lights; red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. We may call this succession, a scale of color lights. They correspond in hue and order to the bands or scale of colored lights in the rainbow, for the latter is the result of an act of nature, which on a very large scale is like our experiment with the prism. Only nature’s prism is formed by a bar of rain on which strikes a shaft of light through a slit in the thick upper clouds.

With this scale of colored lights scientists have made delicate experiments. They have analysed the colors more exactly; discovering, that is to say, the distinct degrees of color, for instance, between the red and the orange, as the one passes into the other; and again between the orange and the yellow, the yellow and the green, and so on. Then, after discovering the succession of monochromatic tints, as they call them, by optical instruments, they have tested the power of the human eye to discriminate, or detect the difference between these various tints. Notwithstanding that the difference between the latter is so slight, they have found that the eye is sensitive to something like two million monochromatic tints. I mention it not to trouble you with figures but to stir your imagination; for such a fact should fill us with admiration not only of the marvellous qualities of light but also of the marvellous capacity of the human eye. It helps us to begin to realise the miracle of light and the immense field of study that lies open to the artist who is a colorist, to whom, that is to say, it is the color of the visible world that most appeals.

Light, then, contains within itself all colors. When light falls upon an object, for example, a leaf, the latter absorbs some of the colors of the light and throws off others. The part thrown off in the case of the leaf is what we call its color: green, or it may be greenish yellow, or a bluish green, or in autumn, crimson. Every substance has this power of absorbing some of the light and of throwing off the rest; and it is the different chemical properties of different substances that decide which of the colors of light they will absorb and which they will throw off; or, as we say, causes them to be a certain color.

We have spoken of the human eye being sensitive to an immense variety of colors. Let us consider the meaning of sensitive. In the first place, the eye receives an impression that causes it to telegraph to the brain a record of the hue; but it means more, for the word sensitive implies a capacity to feel. In some way or other the brain receives an impression of feeling. Just how it does, I understand, is not known; but scientists tell us that these impressions of sight, while they are not quite similar to the feelings aroused by sound, have something in common. Just as some sounds give pleasure while others are disturbing, so with colors—we receive from them sensations of pain or pleasure. According to the degree of our sensitiveness to sound or color our feelings are aroused. It may be only slightly, or it may be more intensely. It is pleasant, for example, to hear the sound of the robin’s note, and, as we peep out of our bedroom window to look at him, we may catch sight of the yellow or red notes of color that the tulips are beginning to make against the dark earth. They too will give us pleasure. And in both cases our pleasure may go no further than just a little enjoyment of their note of color or sound. Or, on the other hand, they may stir our imagination. We recognise their notes as the first signs of spring. Nature in her mysterious way has whispered alike to the robin and the tulip that the rigor of winter is over; that spring is come with its birth of new life, bringing beauty and happiness in its train. And in ourselves, as we recognise the notes of spring, life leaps up with a new sense of the beauty and happiness of living. Those notes, in fact, which began by giving only simple pleasure to our ear, have stirred ideas in our minds; they have become associated in our imagination with a fuller and higher sense of life.

On the other hand, some notes of sound distress us. The unexpected discharge of a gun may strike us unpleasantly; the roar of the wind and the rain against the window fill us with melancholy; the cry of a creature in pain, even before we know whence the cry comes or the reason of it, may cut us like a knife. I mean, that sounds, quite apart from any definite thoughts that we associate with them, may hurt us. So may colors. I might illustrate this by saying that sometimes when we enter a room the color of the carpet, perhaps green with red roses as big as cabbages, and the color of the furniture, which may be of gold upholstered in blue, seem to start up and hit us a bang in the eye. But perhaps you like smart colors, so I will offer another example. Shakespeare said—

She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i’ the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek. She pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy,
She sat, like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief.

Shakespeare’s opportunity of seeing pictures had been very limited. In fact, I am sure that he was not thinking of pictures when he described melancholy as “green and yellow.” Either he had an instinctive dislike of this combination that probably he could not have explained; simply he felt it to be disagreeable; or he may have associated it in his imagination with something he had observed. Perhaps for instance, since he speaks in the next line of a “monument,” he may have been thinking of the green and yellow stains on old tombstones, so that “green and yellow” suggested to him the very opposite of “damask cheek” with its rosiness of healthy life; in fact the signs of wasting and decay. Anyhow, to Shakespeare’s imagination these colors represented something disagreeable. That is the point. Colors, like sounds, may excite feelings of distress or pleasure.