The truth appears to be that in color there are various scales of intensity and strength. If the key-note, or, in other words, the most decided color in your picture, be strong and vivid, you will have to carry out the whole picture on the same scale. If it be of a delicate or neutral tint, you must treat the remainder of the picture accordingly.
Good specimens of old stained-glass windows, where the strongest reds, blues, greens, and yellows are seen in juxtaposition, are fine examples of a powerful rich harmony of color, and many pictures of the Dutch school are very good illustrations of harmony of a delicate gray kind.
This sort of low-toned harmony is much more easily obtained than the stronger and richer kind. The reason for this is that faults of color and errors of taste are much less conspicuous in a gray picture than in a brilliantly colored one. In the former all the costumes are of a whitey-brown, buff, or slate color, and an injudicious distribution of these Quaker-like tints would be hardly noticeable; but in a work where strong reds, yellows, blues, and blacks predominate, the substitution of one color for another would be fatal to the picture.
In landscape again, it is far easier to paint the gray land of mountain and mist than the brilliant sunshine of the South. Any one who honestly attempts to depict the blue Mediterranean sparkling in the sunshine will probably be severely criticised, whilst his neighbor who has painted the kind of Highland scenery we all know so well, will get praised for his painstaking truthfulness, although his picture may be in every respect inferior as a transcript of nature to the Southern one.
The axiom to be derived from this is, that whatever your subject may be, whether figures or landscape, it is comparatively easy to succeed as a colorist in a low or gray scale of color.
I do not mean to recommend any shirking of difficulties, and if your subject is of a nature which requires brilliant coloring, by all means endeavor to paint it up to the mark; but in decorative work, and in pictures which admit of a tender and soft coloring, you will do well to select grays, bluish greens, and broken tints generally.
Your shortcomings will be less conspicuous, and you will avoid the risk of becoming tawdry and vulgar.
Some men are born with a strong natural feeling for color, and a good many more fancy they have this gift without really possessing it. Some have an exceptionally dull sense for color, and although they may be quite able to distinguish red from green, yet they cannot be taught to discriminate between different shades of the same color.
To students belonging to any of these three classes I am afraid my lecture will be of no use.
The first—that is, the born colorists—will instinctively use harmonious tints, and their natural feeling will be a better guide to them than any lectures. The second class—namely, those who fondly believe themselves to be colorists—will, of course, not attend to any thing I may say; and those to whom nature has denied a sense of color are unteachable, just as it is hopeless to teach music to a man who has no ear.