ADDRESSES ON DECORATIVE COLOUR 503

it was gradated. The great beauty of colour consisted in a sort of twilight melancholy-a dying away; no colour was, in fact, of use till it appeared to be dying. Colour might be gradated by passing into other colours, or by becoming paler or darker. Instances of subtle gradation of colour¹ were shown in the flowers of the scarlet cactus, and in some of the beautiful water-colour drawings of Turner. This same law was pre-eminently to be found among the illuminated works of the thirteenth century, where white lines or dots were most judiciously and effectively introduced for the purpose of gradating colours.

35. A second and not less important point always observed by the successful colourist was the excessive delicacy to which he strove to bring all the hues he laid on, whether the working was large or small. When a person had coloured rightly, a grain more or a grain less would injure the whole. This delicacy was carried to such an extent by Paul Veronese, that in one of his largest pictures, now in Paris, a small white hair upon the paw of a cat playing with a vase in the foreground was essential to the completeness of the picture.² Another striking instance of this extreme delicacy was to be seen in a plum painted by the greatest of living fruit-painters, Mr. Hunt, where a minute spot of scarlet was plainly seen upon the surface, and produced a most pleasing and agreeable effect to the eye. It was this extreme delicacy of all good colour, and the care which was taken in its application even to architectural decoration, that rendered fruitless and unsuccessful all attempts to restore or to represent the old decorations upon any architectural works of the past centuries. We know nothing of what colours were employed by the Egyptians, or by any of the ancient decorators. We had found a bit of red in one place and a powder of blue or yellow upon some other, and we know nothing more. There were nearly twenty different reds now known to us; which one did the Egyptians use? Most certainly not that one which was now employed to represent the revived monuments of that age and country. Till we knew this we could not restore the rudest monument of past ages! Until we knew absolutely and certainly what colours they used,-till, in fact, we could call the men up from the dead,-we had no right to touch what they had left behind.

36. Another important law to be always kept in mind was the law of surprise. This law in colour was one of the chief sources of pleasure,-just as in music, the change to one note, when another was expected, formed the principal cause of the delight experienced in listening to the finest works of the composers. To the works of the old masters this “law of surprise” was uniformly acted upon, and the painters appear to have set themselves certain laws, and then suddenly to have transgressed them in a most playful and effective manner. An instance of this was shown in an illuminated MS. On one side was a number of heads within ovals, following each other regularly, when suddenly, towards the close of the series, an irregularly minded angel clapped his wing over his head, outside the oval. In another

¹ [On this subject compare Modern Painters, vol. ii. (Vol. IV. p. 89).]

² [The picture referred to is the “Marriage in Cana.” Compare what Ruskin says of the delicacy of effect in “The Family of Darius,” No. 294 in the National Gallery (Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. viii. ch. iv. § 18, and Lectures on Landscape, § 68).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]