[44] I insist upon this unalterability of color the more because I address you as a beginner, or an amateur: a great artist can sometimes get out of a difficulty with credit, or repent without confession. Yet even Titian's alterations usually show as stains on his work.
[45] It is, I think, a piece of affectation to try to work with few colors: it saves time to have enough tints prepared without mixing, and you may at once allow yourself these twenty-four. If you arrange them in your color-box in the order I have set them down, you will always easily put your finger on the one you want.
| Cobalt | Smalt | Antwerb blue | Prussian blue |
| Black | Gamboge | Emerald green | Hooker's green |
| Lemon yellow | Cadmium yellow | Yellow ocher | Roman ocher |
| Raw sienna | Burnt sienna | Light red | Indian red |
| Mars orange | Extract of vermilion | Carmine | Violet carmine |
| Brown madder | Burnt umber | Vandyke brown | Sepia |
Antwerp blue and Prussian blue are not very permanent colors, but you need not care much about permanence in your work as yet, and they are both beautiful; while Indigo is marked by Field as more fugitive still, and is very ugly. Hooker's green is a mixed color, put in the box merely to save you loss of time in mixing gamboge and Prussian blue. No. 1 is the best tint of it. Violet carmine is a noble color for laying broken shadows with, to be worked into afterwards with other colors.
If you wish to take up coloring seriously you had better get Field's "Chromatography" at once; only do not attend to anything it says about principles or harmonies of color; but only to its statements of practical serviceableness in pigments, and of their operations on each other when mixed, etc.
[46] A more methodical, though under general circumstances uselessly prolix way, is to cut a square hole, some half an inch wide, in the sheet of cardboard, and a series of small circular holes in a slip of cardboard an inch wide. Pass the slip over the square opening, and match each color beside one of the circular openings. You will thus have no occasion to wash any of the colors away. But the first rough method is generally all you want, as, after a little practice, you only need to look at the hue through the opening in order to be able to transfer it to your drawing at once.
[47] If colors were twenty times as costly as they are, we should have many more good painters. If I were Chancellor of the Exchequer I would lay a tax of twenty shillings a cake on all colors except black, Prussian blue, Vandyke brown, and Chinese white, which I would leave for students. I don't say this jestingly; I believe such a tax would do more to advance real art than a great many schools of design.
[48] I say modern, because Titian's quiet way of blending colors, which is the perfectly right one, is not understood now by any artist. The best color we reach is got by stippling; but this is not quite right.
[49] See [Note 6] in Appendix I.
[50] The worst general character that color can possibly have is a prevalent tendency to a dirty yellowish green, like that of a decaying heap of vegetables; this color is accurately indicative of decline or paralysis in missal-painting.