Howard, Frank: Colour, as a means of art: being an adaptation of the experience of professors to the practice of amateurs (London, 1838)

ABSTRACT PRINCIPLES. 63

Certain tints of green become disagreeable in
certain parts of pictures, from association of ideas.
Green in flesh, excites the idea of corruption and
decay. Green in skies, occasioned by blending
the warm yellows of sunset with the blue, excite
the impression of want of skill to prevent the one
tint running into the other.

But in reservation it must be repeated, that there
is no tint that cannot be controlled and made
available by great skill and management to the
purposes of Art. These warnings are for begin-
ners and amateurs ; and the work is intended to
shew them what they may do with safety: as they
attain proficiency, they may attempt difficulties,
which principally reside in truth of detail in com-
bination with agreeable general effect. When to
this is added a just subservience to Poetical Cha-
racter, the greatest requisitions of the Art have
been complied with: all other difficulties, of what-
ever nature, being merely a species of mountebank
trickery, beneath the aim of high Art; and deserving
of the well-known sarcasm of Dr. Johnson upon
some difficult music, that " he wished it were
impossible."