Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/459

Rh $$W$$, inside the color triangle, so that any straight line passing through it will on striking the sides of the triangle join two hues which produce white. This method of finding the complementaries necessarily implies that they must be separated from one another by a considerable distance on the spectrum. For representing these facts a circle instead of a triangle may he employed, and for practical purposes, in the use of colors in painting, such a circle has been found more useful than the triangle. Before we proceed to explain its use, however, it may be well to indicate some of the applications which can be made in art of the facts we have already learned.

It is in pointilism that this application is most evident. In this method the pigments are laid down in minute areas or spots or lines so that, when the picture is viewed from a certain distance, the different hues act on the same nerve endings of the retina and therefore produce the same effect as if they had been superimposed, as by the use of Maxwell's discs. Thus, if a white surface be dotted over with red, green and violet, or any other primary colors, or with red and greenish-blue, or any other complementary colors, the surface at a certain distance will appear grayish white. If, in any of the combinations, one hue be in preponderance of the others the gray will become correspondingly tinted, so that a complete picture may be built np of areas which on close inspection are a mosaic of pure colors but appear at a distance as tinted grays.

The impressionists, Monet, Segantini, etc., appear to have laid as the basis of their picture a gray at the brightness (or value) which they desired each portion of it to assume. On these surfaces they then applied color more or less pointilistically. The neo-impressionists, such as Seurat and Segniac, on the other hand, went a step further in that the saturation was made to depend entirely on the synthetic principle. They laid on their pigments strictly in dots on a surface which was as nearly pure white as possible. Some of these neo-impressionists had, however, already begun to apply certain of the principles of color apposition in masses which we shall study later. To build up a picture pointilistically must obviously greatly increase the technical difficulties of the artist, especially with regard to outline and form; his freedom of expression is also seriously curtailed. It becomes necessary therefore that very great advantages should be the outcome of such labor. Among the advantages are the sense of atmosphere, the vibrating, scintillating quality of the color areas and the very satisfactory transitions at the edges between them, all of which are qualities that can be rendered in no way so satisfactory as by pointilism.

There can be little doubt that a great part of the peculiar impression produced by pointilism depends upon the slight movements which the eyeballs are constantly undergoing, even during our most intent fixation. This of course produces a certain amount of overlapping of the colors