A Child's Guide to Pictures

by Charles H. Caffin

And, if single notes may give pleasure, how much more a number of them. It is when a number of them are combined into a composition that a harmony is produced. The musician creates a harmony of sound, the painter a harmony of color. The secret of a harmony is the relation that the separate notes of sound or color in it bear to one another. If I try to explain this, it is not because I wish to tell you how to make a color harmony, but because I hope the explanation may help you to enjoy it. Perhaps we may get an idea of what relation means if we think of a football team. It consists of a number of individuals with separate duties. Some play forward, others half-back, quarter-back, and so on. When each member not only does his own work as well as possible but plays well into the hands of the other members, we speak of the excellence of the team work. And in nine cases out of ten it is not brilliant individual play, but fine all-round team-work that wins the game. The different members are so well related to one another, that the whole team works harmoniously.

It is similar in a harmony of colors. For perhaps you see that what I wish you to understand is not that a few bright colors make a harmony, but that it is the result of a combination. There must be team-work among the colors. They count as individual spots of color, but still more in relation to all the other colors. There may be one or more crack players—I mean predominant[9] notes of color,—but they will have colleagues or assistants—colors of the same hue but differing in degree—which will repeat or echo their effect, with variations all over the canvas. These subordinate colors and the crack ones will play in and out, backing one another up, and, as it were, passing the ball backward and forward into one another’s hands; acting in such exact relation to one another, that their efforts result in a perfect harmony of effect.

But so far we have been thinking only of one team, working out its scheme of attack and defense in practice play. There is a more complicated play, namely, when the team is pitted against a rival team. So in color. An artist will introduce rivalry, or competition into his color scheme; namely, two crack notes of color that, seen by themselves, would produce a disagreeable sensation. Why does he do so? Because he knows the value of contrast and discord; just as you know it is more fun to watch a game of football between two well-matched rival teams than the merely practice play of one of them. For now the artist is pitting one set of colors against another set; the crack players on both sides and their backers-up—the colors of different but closely related hue; and the game between them is fast and furious—an interplay of likes and unlikes, of repetitions and of contrasts. The excitement of the game results from the even balance of the two rival sets of colors, swaying backward and forward over the gridiron—I mean the canvas—massing here and there, then scattering in a burst of animation—the two teams so evenly matched that their rivalry only makes the give and take of the game more brilliantly harmonious.

Such, in a way, is the harmony of color, as it appears in the pictures of a true colorist. It has a focal point of intensity where the effect is massed, but all about it, scattered over the canvas, is the interplay of related similarities and contrasts, all of which combine into a harmonious whole.

It may help you, as it has helped me, to understand the combination of these numberless repetitions and contrasts of color, if I tell you of an experience of sound that I remember. I was one of a party walking in the Swiss mountains, and at a turn in the path we came upon a man, sitting with a gun across his knees. For a small amount this mountaineer was prepared to let off his gun. We paid, he fired. There was a sharp report—a focal point of sound—then a neighboring mountain side sent back an echo, which was caught by another that sent it back, whence again it was re-echoed from another mountain peak, and so on, back and forth, until in a moment or two, the whole mountain world resounded with a wondrous roar. From a single note of sound, which made a very slight impression had grown a multiplication of slightly differing sounds. For the first echo was slightly different to the original note, and then again the echo of this echo differed slightly, so too the echo that came next and the one that followed that, and so on through a scale of slightly varying tones, that finally merged into one huge swell of throbbing sound, as of some mighty organ music—a harmony of tumult. It was a wonderful sensation, and has helped me to realise the wonder of color harmony. For an artist generally founds his color scheme upon one or two notes of color, and then by representing the echoes of these colors, as they are reflected at different angles from the various planes of surface, gradually elaborates or works out a maze of related colors that merge into a harmony.

On the other hand it is not only by painting the interplay of reflections that an artist produces a harmony of color. There is a less complicated way, represented in Japanese prints and paintings, and in the work done by some of our artists who have adopted their method. In this case the color is flat; the objects, that is to say, are not modeled by lights and darks. The form, instead of being actually represented is only suggested. Consequently there are no reflections and the colors are laid on flatly and smoothly. But they are most carefully related to one another; both in quantity and tint. The artist, for example, may use only rose and lavender and black. But his sense of color is first shown in his choice of the particular tints of rose and lavender and black, and then secondly, in his distribution of these on the white paper. Perhaps he determines to make the black his crack player. But he wishes to produce a balance of harmony of all his colors, so he carefully considers how large a space the chief spot of black shall occupy, and then what quantity of the remaining spaces shall be occupied by the rose and lavender and the white paper. Having thus worked out the ground plan of the scheme, he may elaborate it by repeating some of the black in other parts of the picture, and by introducing echoes of the rose and lavender in the large spot of black. The echoes, in this case, you observe, are not reflections, they are simply repetitions in smaller quantities of the colors of the main spots. His composition, in fact, is a pattern of main spots, and their echoes; the whole presenting a unity and harmony because the colors are in exact relation.

And when this has been done either in a simple harmony or a more elaborate one, with the true feeling of a colorist, no alteration can be made in any part of the picture without producing a discord, destroying, that is to say, the exquisite balance of the whole. I mean, that if, for instance, you were to cut off a part of the picture in order to make it fill a frame, you would destroy the harmony of the whole. For now the relation of the colors will have been disturbed. There is no longer the same balance in the quantity of each, nor do they occupy the same related position in the composition.

In a word, as we said above, the secret of color harmony is the relation of the separate colors to one another and the whole.

CHAPTER XIV
COLOR (Continued)—VALUES—SUBTLETY

SO far in our talk on color we have laid stress on three points: first, that color is light; secondly, that color is affected by light; thirdly, that the painter who is a colorist arranges color in relation to other colors, so as to produce a harmony.