DOI chapter:
Colour photography
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.47958#0028
COLOUR PHOTOGRAPHY
craft. All the evidence lies openly before him ; it merely remains
for him to authorise his senses to deliver sentence frankly.
And as he listens to that nervous pronouncement I think that he
will find, almost without exception, that it falls into two main
divisions. Each of these divisions is prefaced by a brief spurt of
quick wonder, itself a kind of pleasure indeed, but of no more real
account than a formal introduction to a speech: it is only when that
delight in the mere novelty of the thing, that admiration for its
ingenuity, has briskly effervesced and faded that the really funda-
mental utterance begins to reach him. He is looking, let us say,
at Mr. Bernard Shaw’s little landscape (No. 93)—the grey church
tower rising up among the autumn leafage, the slant of cloudless
sky ascending sharply behind ; and he finds that his sensation is
almost precisely that which he gets when he looks at a piece ot
nature through the wrong end of a telescope—the effect or a
sharpened and acidulated nature, a nature curiously tense and
glittering, almost metallic. And he turns from this, let us say,
to such an ambitious figure-study as Mr. Kuhn’s “ Playmates ”
(No. 63), a piece of deliberate picture-making, with models posed
and equipped ; and he finds here, just as inevitably, that the effect
is that of a picture which has been suddenly robbed of all those deli-
cate nerves and tendons of pervasive colour-chords, the sly echoes
and running threads, which the painter uses to pull his work into
one mounting accordance. Those are the two sensations, one or
other of which, in a greater or a less degree, will be provoked by
almost all the colour-pictures in this book. The spectator finds
on the one hand, that is to say, that his enjoyment is never more
than that which comes from hearing a rather tart echo of Nature.
Or he finds, on the other, that his enjoyment is always less than
that which comes in the presence of a painted picture.
These are significant conclusions. Before we accept them as final,
however—before we enforce the verdict which they seem to make
inevitable, there is yet one court of appeal to which the case can
be referred. For these slight divergencies—the absence of those
uniting threads of colour, the presence of that hard open-air asperity
■—might be merely the result of the temporary clumsinesses and
uncertainties which follow the acquisition of any new power: as
the fingers grow more skilful, the secret of those sly interweavings
may be acquired, some method of sweetening that tartness be
discovered. We must attempt, therefore, to ascertain how far these
qualities are inherent and therefore irremediable, or how far they
are accidental and momentary. We must approach the matter
2
craft. All the evidence lies openly before him ; it merely remains
for him to authorise his senses to deliver sentence frankly.
And as he listens to that nervous pronouncement I think that he
will find, almost without exception, that it falls into two main
divisions. Each of these divisions is prefaced by a brief spurt of
quick wonder, itself a kind of pleasure indeed, but of no more real
account than a formal introduction to a speech: it is only when that
delight in the mere novelty of the thing, that admiration for its
ingenuity, has briskly effervesced and faded that the really funda-
mental utterance begins to reach him. He is looking, let us say,
at Mr. Bernard Shaw’s little landscape (No. 93)—the grey church
tower rising up among the autumn leafage, the slant of cloudless
sky ascending sharply behind ; and he finds that his sensation is
almost precisely that which he gets when he looks at a piece ot
nature through the wrong end of a telescope—the effect or a
sharpened and acidulated nature, a nature curiously tense and
glittering, almost metallic. And he turns from this, let us say,
to such an ambitious figure-study as Mr. Kuhn’s “ Playmates ”
(No. 63), a piece of deliberate picture-making, with models posed
and equipped ; and he finds here, just as inevitably, that the effect
is that of a picture which has been suddenly robbed of all those deli-
cate nerves and tendons of pervasive colour-chords, the sly echoes
and running threads, which the painter uses to pull his work into
one mounting accordance. Those are the two sensations, one or
other of which, in a greater or a less degree, will be provoked by
almost all the colour-pictures in this book. The spectator finds
on the one hand, that is to say, that his enjoyment is never more
than that which comes from hearing a rather tart echo of Nature.
Or he finds, on the other, that his enjoyment is always less than
that which comes in the presence of a painted picture.
These are significant conclusions. Before we accept them as final,
however—before we enforce the verdict which they seem to make
inevitable, there is yet one court of appeal to which the case can
be referred. For these slight divergencies—the absence of those
uniting threads of colour, the presence of that hard open-air asperity
■—might be merely the result of the temporary clumsinesses and
uncertainties which follow the acquisition of any new power: as
the fingers grow more skilful, the secret of those sly interweavings
may be acquired, some method of sweetening that tartness be
discovered. We must attempt, therefore, to ascertain how far these
qualities are inherent and therefore irremediable, or how far they
are accidental and momentary. We must approach the matter
2