COLOR HARMONY
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crude and violent contrasts. A child revels in strong chromas, but the mark of a colorist is ability to employ low chroma without impoverishing the color effect. As a boy’s shrieks and groans can be tempered to musical utterance, so his debauches in violent red, green, and purple must be replaced by tempered hues.
(177) Raphael, Titian, Velasquez, Corot, Chavannes, and Whistler are masters in the use of gray. Personal bias may lead one colorist a little more toward warm colors, and another slightly toward the cool field, in each case attaining a sense of harmonious balance by tempered degrees of value and chroma.[1]
(178) It is not claimed that discipline in the use of subtle colors will make another Corot or Velasquez, but it will make for com- prehension of their skill. It is grotesque to watch gaudily dressed persons going into ecstasies over the delicate coloring of a Botticelli, when the internal as well as the external evidence is against them.
(179) The colors which we choose, not only in personal apparel, but in our rooms and decorations, are mute witnesses to a stage of color perception.
If that perception is trained to finer distinctions, the mind can no longer be content with coarse expression. It begins to feel an incongruity between the “loud” color of the wall paper, bought because it was fashionable, and the quiet hues of the rug, which was a gift from some artistic friend. It sees that, although the furniture is covered with durable and costly materials, their color “swears”? at that of the curtains and wood-work. In short, the
- ↑ “Nature’s most lively hues are bathed in lilac grays. Spread all about us, yet visible
only to the fine perception of the colorist, is this gray quality by which he appeals. Not
he whose pictures abound in ‘couleurs voyantes,’ but he who preserves in his work all
the ‘gris colorés’ is the good colorist.”
Translation from J. F. Rafaelli, in Annales Politiques & Litteraires.
