International studio (22.1904)

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color painters has swung towards a freer use of
water-color and a more liberal employment of all
those various agencies by which color is modified
through manipulation. The one quality in which
water-color exceeds oil, so much that no compari-
son is possible, is in its capacity for a certain high,
brilliant light and what is ordinarily, though some-
what falsely, called pure color. In all the arts of
expression, however, effects are relative. It is not
the knowledge and command of all the words in the
dictionary, but their choice, relation, and succes-
sion in a sentence which awakes the charm of style.
It is not the absolute high light, white patches, or
bare paper which create the effect of light, but
their relation to the general mass of the picture.
Periodically an effort at securing the impression of
sunlight appears and reappears in painting. It has
had its last round and orbit in French impres-
sionists, running on to the present time in slowly
diminishing effects. It was earlier seen and sug-
gested a century before by Tiepolo, as it was two
centuries before by some of the great Florentines.
But always and everywhere it depends, not on abso-
lute shade and color, but altogether upon the rela-
tivity of these two different and opposing things,
color and shadow, and their combined and con-
trasted shadows. Color your shadows, and they
will look luminous relative to the rest of the picture.
Darken them, as in nature, and they cease to have this
relative effect. The brightly tinted and high white
light of the water-color of twenty years ago does
not begin to give the impression of sunlight to the
extent which the duller color and less absolutely
white oil color handled along the formula and
keener perception of the impressionist artist.
Moreover, the water-color, on its old lines, was
without tone to the modern eye, because the mod-
ern eye lives three hundred years after a period of
great painting, whose pictures, now three centuries
old, have been brought to tonal harmony as much
by time as by the painter's brush. In all Helds where
tone asserts its dominance — in the Persian carpet,
which fresh and new often makes one's eyes ache ;
in the decoration of a Moorish building itself, where
water-colors are used which undoubtedly made the
Alhambra in its first estate a thing to shudder over
before slow time had brought that enrapturing tone
of pinkish-yellow which overspreads cusp, crenel-
lation, honeycomb, and lacunar—time brings tone.
So with painting. The passion for tone is really
an emulous desire to reproduce in the work of the
moment and the day the same balanced charm
which has come while the years slowly worked on
pictures and brought what may once have been
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color over accentuated or out of key into one com-
mon, calm, even charm. The double task of those,
therefore, who turn from the water-color of the
middle of the nineteenth century to its development
in the last twenty years was to recur to the free
use of water-color not wet, until the brush is like a
bubble, but handled with paint of even consistency,
so as to render possible the manipulation and gra-
dation from which relativity of effect is produced,
and in the next place to secure that even balance
of attuned radiance, rather than of radiant color,
which marks all work in oil since there came some
seventy years ago the sudden discovery that the real
men to admire were not the later gods, who were
being copied in the last half of the eighteenth cen-
tury, but those earlier artists for whose work time
had done more and academic training less. It
was by no means through accident that Rembrandt
and Velasquez, so closely related in time, did their
work at just the period when the painters of the
fifteenth and sixteenth century were just old enough
to begin to show the tone of time. What these
earlier men were at that fresh period we shall never
know. Even when they worked in black and white,
in various mediums where water instead of oil was
the chief vehicle, or in crayon and chalk, all their
work in its basal material, canvas, wood, plaster,
or paper, and in the color itself, has for both gone
through the changes of time.
Nothing can change the elemental charm which
comes from the capacity of these men to see the
world about them with sentient feeling of its mass
and not merely of its extension, of its relation in
color and in shadow, and not merely in coloring
and in illumination. But none the less they owe,
as all things in the arts of expression long past
always are indebted, much to the two effects of
time. There is first its power of harmonizing by
those changes which to. all works of art applies
the same slow chemic of atmosphere which glorifies
the hillside and tops the mountain peak with its
temporal coronal, — a physical change in the sur-
face which they present and second time's task and
touch is to give the associations which stir us all
with the consciousness that through a long tradition
others have shared the same emotion, thrilled to
the same inspiration, and felt the same surge and
tide which wells from some eternal fount.
These things the modern artist cannot have. If
he is wise and bold like Stuart, he overdoes the red
of some of his great sitter's cheek, conscious that a
century will bring it into harmony with the darks
and shadows of his picture; but if he is only wise
and not bold, he is instead constantly tempted to