WATER-COLORS
Color, if you stop to think, is really the decorative touch which God gives to the universe. It would have been just as easy to make everything gray—every rose but the shadow of itself—every tree and rock and cloud a monotone of gradation. Instead of that, everything we look at, from a violet to an overbending sky, is enriched and glorified by millions of color tones as infinite in their gradation as the waves of sound and light. Even in the grayest days, when the clouds are bursting into tears and the whole landscape is desolate as the barrenest and bleakest of mountain sides, these infinite gradations of color permeate and redeem its barrenness, and to the true painter fill it with joy and beauty.
There are many of us, however, who are not true painters and to whom the most exquisite of color schemes are but dull results. Many of us walk around our galleries passing the best pictures in silence; others ridicule what they cannot understand. Even our own beloved Mark Twain, whose heart was always open to the best and warmest of human impressions, and who expressed them in every line of his pen, when led up to one of Turner's masterpieces, "The Slave Ship," a glory of red, yellow, and blue running riot over a sunset sky, the whole reflected in a troubled sea, remarked to his companion: "Very wonderful! Seen it before. Always reminds me of a tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a plate of tomato soup."
The education of such barbarians belongs to our generation and should be taken up by those of us who know or think we do. For true color is as great an educator as true music. This knowledge of color harmony, this matching and contrasting of different colors, but very few men and women possess. When they do, it is generally inherited and thus a natural gift. The rest of the world wear blue and purple, or orange and green, entirely ignorant of the harmonies of nature even as bearing on their domestic surroundings. For myself, I have always held that the most perfect harmonies required in either wall decoration, furniture, dress goods, or any other fabrics that color enters into, have their exact counterpart in some color tones of nature—that the russet-browns and yellows of autumn; the contrasting opalescent hues of a morning sky, rose-pink, pale blue, or delicate tea-rose yellow; the gloom of a forest with its yellow-grays and blue-grays, the gray-green moss of the lichens, the brown of the tree-trunks, the black and gray hues of the rocks, all these, if carefully studied and analyzed and reproduced, would make beautiful anything in the world from a bonnet to a château. To illustrate:
Several years ago an intimate friend of mine, a distinguished architect of New York, the late Mr. Bruce Price, in designing a number of cottages at Tuxedo sought in vain for some color mixture current in the paint-shops with which to cover the outside of his buildings. All schemes of browns, olive-greens, colonial yellow with white trimmings and the reverse, Pompeiian reds, slate-grays, and dull yellows resulted in making "spots" of the houses, so that the effect he wished to produce, that of the houses being merged into the forest, was lost. Mr. Price was not only an architect, but he was an artist as well. He had little skill with his brush, but he had that innate good taste, with a keen eye to discern the subtle gradations in color, that only needed change of occupation to make him a painter. One day, looking at a new bare wooden cottage—unpainted as yet—in contrast to a mass of foliage in the early autumn before the leaves had begun to turn, in which the yellow-grays one often sees predominated, he suddenly thought to himself: "The tree-trunks and underbrush do not stand out; they are all of one piece, each keeping its place, while my house"—as he rather inelegantly but forcibly expressed it—"sticks up like a sore thumb." Later, this very clever man made an analysis of the local color in these several grays, and his subsequent matching and combining of these different tints resulted in the exact tones of the forest before him, and when this was completed and the house painted you felt should you enter the front door that the leaves must be over your head.
Bringing the discussion down to more practical details, really to the palettes which we hold in our hands, the question then naturally arises as to how best to express true local color, with its varying blues, yellows, and reds, and especially its varying grays.
In my own experience I find grays to be the prevailing tones everywhere in nature.
I find also that the great masters of modern art, particularly the school of 1830, known as the Barbizon school, and represented by such men as Rousseau, Corot, Daubigny, Diaz, and Millet, and later by men who in some degree represent that school, but to my mind have done work equally good—even Monténard and Cazin—that all these masters have loved, sought for, and expressed in their work this all-prevailing quality, the gray.
A few very simple rules for testing the power, presence, and quality of the prevailing gray in nature are so easily learned and so convincing in their application that once applied they are never forgotten.
Take, for instance, a morning in late spring or early summer, when all nature is dressed from tree-top to grass-blade in a suit of vivid green. To a tyro with so dangerous a weapon as a color-box, there is nothing that will really bring down this game but some explosive composed of indigo and Indian yellow, or Prussian blue and light cadmium—perhaps the strongest mixture of vivid raw green.