240. Olive Terre Verte.
We have obtained a very beautiful olive from terre verte by simply changing its hue. In oil, especially, the colour so produced would be found of service for autumn foliage, or richly painted foregrounds. A simple original pigment, consisting wholly of the earth, it resembles ordinary terre verte in being unaffected by strong light or impure air, and uninjured by admixture; but differs from it in not darkening by time. Semi-transparent, of sober richness and drying well in oil, it is, according to its powers, a perfectly unexceptionable colour, of strict stability.
Of the two olive colours in common use, olive lake and olive green, the first is generally semi-stable, and apt to blacken; while the second is usually fugitive, and liable to fade: both are compounds. The palette, therefore, possesses no original olive pigment, good or bad. A glance at the numbered italicised olives will show that the doubtful mixtures referred to might with advantage be superseded. It is clear that the olive pigments which the palette does not know, are better than those with which it is acquainted.
[CHAPTER XVII.]
ON THE SEMI-NEUTRAL, BROWN.
As colour, according to the regular scale descending from white, ceases properly with the last of the tertiaries, olive, in theory the neutral black would here form a fitting conclusion. Practically, however, every coloured pigment, of every class or tribe, combines with black as it exists in pigments—not simply being deepened or lowered in tone thereby, but likewise defiled in colour, or changed in class. Hence there arises a new series or scale of coloured compounds, having black for their basis, which, though they differ not theoretically from the preceding order inverted, are yet in practice imperfect or impure. These broken compounds of black, or coloured blacks and greys, we have distinguished by the term, semi-neutral, and divided them into three classes: Brown, Marrone, and Gray. What tints are with respect to white, they are with regard to black, being, so to speak, black tints or shades.
The first of the series is Brown, a term which, in its widest acceptation, has been used to include vulgarly every kind of dark broken colour, and is, in a more limited sense, the rather indefinite name of a very extensive class of colours of warm or tawny hues. Accordingly there are browns of every denomination except blue; to wit, yellow-brown, red-brown, orange-brown, purple-brown, citrine-brown, russet-brown, &c. But there is no such thing as a blue-brown, nor, strictly, any other coloured brown in which blue predominates; such predominance of a cold colour at once carrying the compound into the class of gray, ashen, or slate. Brown comprises the hues called dun, hazel, auburn, feuillemort, mort d'ore, &c.; several of which have been already mentioned as allied to the tertiary colours.
The term brown, then, denotes rightly a warm broken colour, of which yellow is a chief constituent: hence brown is in some measure to shade what yellow is to light. Hence, also, proper quantities of either the three primaries, the three secondaries, or the three tertiaries, produce variously a brown mixture. Browns contribute to coolness and clearness by contrast when opposed to pure colours, and Rubens more especially appears to have employed them upon this principle; although the same may be said of Titian, Correggio, Paulo Veronese, and all the best colourists. Being a sort of intermedia between positive colours and neutrality, browns equally contrast colour and shade. This accounts for their vast importance in painting, and the necessity of preserving them distinct from other colours, to which they give foulness in mixture; and to this is due their use in backgrounds and in relieving of coloured objects.