Delacroix’s pictures used to be regularly rejected, or very badly hung, and these same pictures are now considered the gems of the gallery at Versailles. On our side of the Channel we used to turn out Muller’s, and, I believe, Constable’s pictures. These acts of what we should call injustice were not committed from any Academic spite or jealousy. They were simply the expression of the general public opinion at that time.
It may be noted that our predecessors in this country were by no means indifferent to color. On the contrary, they prided themselves on being the crème de la crème of colorists, and any one who expressed admiration for the color of Gros and Géricault would be looked upon as a kind of traitor to the English school.
It was a generally accepted article of belief in England, that the French could draw, but knew nothing about color, and that for fine coloring you must look at home.
We have less national prejudice now, and I hope that we are in a better path toward forming a right judgment than our predecessors were. They almost always judged of the color of a picture by comparing it with similar works by the old masters, and if it reminded them of Titian, Correggio, Rubens, or some other acknowledged colorist, it was pronounced a fine thing. If it were unlike the work of any accepted master of color, it was thought nothing of, however true it might be to nature. Hence as Constable’s pictures resembled neither Claude, Cuyp, nor Ruysdael, they were disliked by the connoisseurs of the period, and were quite unsalable.
A remnant of this artificial way of judging pictures still lingers amongst us, but, speaking generally, the present generation has ceased to take this narrow view of color.
Mistakes in judgment are no doubt made, and posterity may pronounce a different verdict on some of our favorites; still the principle on which we decide whether a man is to be called a colorist or not, is sound.
The principle is briefly this:—That however unusual or novel the coloring of a picture may be, if it reminds one vividly of some harmony of nature, if there is space and air in it, and if the same atmosphere pervades the whole canvas, it is the work of a real colorist.
I have abstained in this lecture from giving you any of the old-fashioned recipes for coloring (such as keeping the shades warm and lights cool, and vice versâ), because I think that all such rules have a tendency to cramp and fetter the artist who follows them. Nothing can be more dissimilar than the works of the Florentine Ghirlandajo and the portraits of Rembrandt, and yet few will deny the right of both these painters to rank as colorists. I might bracket Titian with Rubens, or Correggio with Ostade, to show how broad is the path which leads to excellence in color.
An innate sense of the harmonious color in nature, and a steadfast determination, by hook or by crook, to reproduce an echo of this harmony on your canvas, must ultimately lead to a good result.
No original colorist could tell you by what process he arrives at the effects he obtains. His only secret (if secret it be) is that he observes more closely and intelligently than other men. It is not the colors he uses, nor the canvas, nor the medium, nor even the technical skill of his hand which cause his pictures to look like nature, whilst his neighbor’s look like paint. It is simply what phrenologists would call his bump of color, but what I (who do not believe in bumps) would term his keen appreciation of the harmony of nature, and his retentive memory which enables him to reproduce in his studio the fleeting effects he has seen.