White is our only semblance to light, and what a leaden symbol it is when we regard the brightness of our example!
Black is our deepest dark, and how shallow it is when we try to look into the depth of the shadows about us!
And so it seems but right that, being so utterly unable to reach the heights or the depths of what we wish to depict, we ought to send back and keep down every step or key of our board in the same proportion as our lights and our darks are—make our picture, in fact, not so much the imitation as the dim reflection that we see in a window sometimes when there is a dark cloth hung behind it, or in the camera obscura.
Were I comparing styles, I would say that Turner struck a high note in his scale, and rippling up lost himself in white.
Rembrandt struck a low key, and went out of sight in his blacks.
The low-toned school strike a faint half-note, and playing falsetto, lose themselves in dingy obscurity at both ends, never venturing very high or very low.
All are right from their own standpoint, but the Turner and the Rembrandt schools are nearest truth, because they look straight at nature and not on her reflections; and because, as our whites are already so far below nature’s light, the sooner we strike our nearest approach, the sooner we shall arrive at our imitation, and vice versâ.
To return, though, to our paint: I would fain ask you to regard all beauty as so much mixed colour, something in the same way that the youthful anatomist sees only a lovely dissection in the arm or face that may be sending some other sentimental youth into poetic fits.
I here quote a little from John Ruskin—a man noble and self-sacrificing, whom I can admire, not blindly, like a reasonless lover, but with the qualified reverence of a sensible helpmate. I like to fall in with the fashion when I can. In writing on colour as the test of a painter he says:
‘If he can colour, he is a painter, though he can do nothing else.... The man who can see all the greys, and reds, and purples in a peach will paint the peach rightly round, and rightly altogether; but the man who has only studied its roundness may not see its purples and greys, and if he does not, will never get it to look like a peach; so that great power over colour is always a sign of large art intellect: every other gift may be erroneously cultivated, but this will guide to all healthy, natural, and forcible truth. The student may be led into folly by philosophers’ (the worthy Professor here holds up unconsciously the red light against his own dangers), ‘and into falsehoods by purists, but he is always safe when he holds the hand of a colourist.’ (‘Modern Painters,’ vol. iv. part v. chap. iii.)