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Page 43
To clear the way, I have a word or two to say about the treatment of
the wood-work in our room. If I could I would have no wood-work in
it that needed flat painting, meaning by that word a mere paying it
over with four coats of tinted lead-pigment ground in oils or
varnish, but unless one can have a noble wood, such as oak, I don't
see what else is to be done. I have never seen deal stained
transparently with success, and its natural colour is poor, and will
not enter into any scheme of decoration, while polishing it makes it
worse. In short, it is such a poor material that it must be hidden
unless it be used on a big scale as mere timber. Even then, in a
church roof or what not, colouring it with distemper will not hurt
it, and in a room I should certainly do this to the wood-work of
roof and ceiling, while I painted such wood-work as came within
touch of hand. As to the colour of this, it should, as a rule, be
of the same general tone as the walls, but a shade or two darker in
tint. Very dark wood-work makes a room dreary and disagreeable,
while unless the decoration be in a very bright key of colour, it
does not do to have the wood-work lighter than the walls. For the
rest, if you are lucky enough to be able to use oak, and plenty of
it, found your decoration on that, leaving it just as it comes from
the plane.
Now, as you are not bound to use anything for the decoration of your
walls but simple tints, I will here say a few words on the main
colours, before I go on to what is more properly decoration, only in
speaking of them one can scarce think only of such tints as are fit
to colour a wall with, of which, to say truth, there are not many.
Though we may each have our special preferences among the main
colours, which we shall do quite right to indulge, it is a sign of
disease in an artist to have a prejudice against any particular
colour, though such prejudices are common and violent enough among
people imperfectly educated in art, or with naturally dull
perceptions of it. Still, colours have their ways in decoration, so
to say, both positively in themselves, and relatively to each man's
way of using them. So I may be excused for setting down some things
I seem to have noticed about these ways.
Yellow is not a colour that can be used in masses unless it be much
broken or mingled with other colours, and even then it wants some
material to help it out, which has great play of light and shade in
it. You know people are always calling yellow things golden, even
when they are not at all the colour of gold, which, even unalloyed,
is not a bright yellow. That shows that delightful yellows are not
very positive, and that, as aforesaid, they need gleaming materials
to help them. The light bright yellows, like jonquil and primrose,
are scarcely usable in art, save in silk, whose gleam takes colour
from and adds light to the local tint, just as sunlight does to the
yellow blossoms which are so common in Nature. In dead materials,
such as distemper colour, a positive yellow can only be used
sparingly in combination with other tints.
Red is also a difficult colour to use, unless it be helped by some
beauty of material, for, whether it tend toward yellow and be called
scarlet, or towards blue and be crimson, there is but little
pleasure in it, unless it be deep and full. If the scarlet pass a
certain degree of impurity it falls into the hot brown-red, very
disagreeable in large masses. If the crimson be much reduced it
tends towards a cold colour called in these latter days magenta,
impossible for an artist to use either by itself or in combination.
The finest tint of red is a central one between crimson and scarlet,
and is a very powerful colour indeed, but scarce to be got in a flat
tint. A crimson broken by greyish-brown, and tending towards
russet, is also a very useful colour, but, like all the finest reds,
is rather a dyer's colour than a house-painter's; the world being
very rich in soluble reds, which of course are not the most enduring
of pigments, though very fast as soluble colours.
Pink, though one of the most beautiful colours in combination, is
not easy to use as a flat tint even over moderate spaces; the more
orangy shades of it are the most useful, a cold pink being a colour
much to be avoided.
As to purple, no one in his senses would think of using it bright in
masses. In combination it may be used somewhat bright, if it be
warm and tend towards red; but the best and most characteristic
shade of purple is nowise bright, but tends towards russet.
Egyptian porphyry, especially when contrasted with orange, as in the
pavement of St. Mark's at Venice, will represent the colour for you.
At the British Museum, and one or two other famous libraries, are
still left specimens of this tint, as Byzantine art in its palmy
days understood it. These are books written with gold and silver on
vellum stained purple, probably with the now lost murex or fish-dye
of the ancients, the tint of which dye-stuff Pliny describes
minutely and accurately in his 'Natural History.' I need scarcely
say that no ordinary flat tint could reproduce this most splendid of
colours.
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