Page:Drawing for Beginners.djvu/146

 the gorgeous sunset, or the meadows rioting with gold and crimson blossoms.

It is worse than useless to plaster your picture with brilliant reds, yellows, and blues because you think by doing so you display a fine sense of colour.

It is perfectly true that we must use the colours as fully as we feel justified. But we must feel justified.

the great colourists of old used their crimsons, and golds, and blues, and purples lavishly, they revelled in rich silks and brocades, in brilliant skies; in short, in the dazzling mixture of many tints. Out of these gay scenes of streets, piazzas, palaces, and market-squares floated the brilliant colours, blended and made harmonious by the dazzling light of the sun.

Nature always harmonizes, and blends tints unerringly.

When we with our miserable little colour-boxes would paint crude tints, Nature takes us by the hand and shows where we go wrong.

Imagine a subject composed of nothing but clashing colours. Could anything, we ask ourselves, right that wrong?

Once I saw a girl standing in a field not far outside the city of Madrid. She wore a purple handkerchief on her head, a crimson and purple skirt looped over her petticoat. She had in her arms a huge sheath of blue cornflowers and she stood knee-deep in scarlet poppies. Not one red agreed with another red, the purples were vivid, and the blue was crude. Yet the whole scene was pleasing because it was bathed in a brilliantly clear air. The purity of the atmosphere made all the crude tints harmonize.

Painting does not mean placing all the paints upon a sheet of paper. That any foolish person can do.

But painting is selecting the right tints, and playing our tunes with those tints harmoniously.

Suppose we take a simple object, a small Flanders poppy, scarlet hued, with folded petals of silk, and look at that with a view to painting it.

Then we will ask ourselves, "What is the colour that flows