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

82 PRINCIPLES OF

A writer in Blackwood's Magazine of the
Neri faction says, " We have received a
prescriptive right to make war upon the rising
heresy of light pictures, and we will wage it
to the knife," or some such expressions.

Certain tones of colour have been found to
be almost universally recognized as agreeables
and by the above mentioned class of artists;
and critics, the Neri, it is held to be "fine
colouring," to reduce every representation without
consideration of propriety, to these conventionally
agreeable tones. Plate. Sir Joshua Reynolds
commends a picture of a moonlight scene by
Rubens, which is so rich in colour, that if you
hide the moon it appears like a sunset.

The background of the far-famed Mercury,
Venus and Cupid, by Corregio, in the National
Gallery, and the sky of the Bacchus and
Ariadne, by Titian, in the same collection, are
instances of this practice, the use of conventionally
agreeable tones, which may be seen by every
one. It would be difficult to say what the
former was meant for, except background to
the figures : and no one ever saw a sky such a blue
as the latter. It irresistibly brings to mind the
counter criticism of a sceptic to the admiration of
a landscape by Poussin, in which Sir ----------, a