THE SENSE OF COLOR. 255 



From this little experiment we may conclude that a warm light 

 provokes a cold shadow, a cold light a warm shadow, and that the 

 color of the shadow is complementary to that of the light. In the 

 experiment, daylight was the source of the cold light. Let us now 

 take a third source of light, warmer than that of the candle, the 

 flame produced by burning alcohol and salt — a very warm, deep 

 orange light, which makes the light of the candle seem cold and its 

 blue shadows appear yellow, while its own shadows are blue. 



We recently observed a very striking example of these warm and 

 cold appearances of light; it was at the theater: a beam of red light 

 shone brightly upon an actor, whose shadow was absolutely green. 

 Some of the people around us were astonished at the phenomenon, 

 which they could perceive very plainly. Phenomena of this kind 

 are produced every instant in a nature illuminated by the sun; 

 nearly all the shadows are colored in hues which we can distin- 

 guish with a little attention where the unpracticed eye sees nothing 

 but gray. Thus in a mountainous country, exposed to the warm light 

 of the sun, the mountains in the horizon appear blue through the 

 haze; then, as evening draws on, the sun appears a deeper orange, 

 more reddish, while the sky seems green by contrast, and the red 

 rays of the sun falling on the mountains turn them violet, in those 

 beautiful tints which give so much glory to those countries of large 

 shadows and bright lights. 



However intense the light of day may be, it is therefore always 

 colored, and gives those colored shadows which painters do not 

 always observe. The painter, in fact, should make an analysis of 

 the complex light around him, and should repeat the result in syn- 

 thesis on his canvas. Upon hardly any other condition can he 

 represent the transparency of the atmosphere, or the luminosity of 

 a subject or a landscape. These colored shadows are not, there- 

 fore, false colors, as often seems to be believed, or optical illusions; 

 they are really existent, but our eyes are hardly ever practiced 

 enough to discern them; we are deficient in education of the color 

 sense. This education is not hard to attain. There are persons who 

 have special aptitudes and are consequently remarkable colorists, 

 just as some persons have an admirably organized ear for music; but, 

 besides these, it is possible for all persons endowed with the faculty 

 of observing and capable of attention to acquire with considerable 

 rapidity the faculty of discerning colors, where they at present 

 hardly see anything but confused gray masses. (The epithet gray, 

 we may observe, is used as applied to many things the color of which 

 is not susceptible of exact determination.) Such attentive observation 

 of colors is, however, attended- with some danger to painters. Every 

 person prefers some one color, is influenced by a particular shade. 



