188 



THE CIVIL ENGINEER AND ARCHITECT'S JOURNAL. 



[May, 



1. The Luxes of Harmunious Colouring. 33y D. R. Hay. Lon- 

 dun : W. S. Orr. "1839. 



2. Lectures on Colour. By Hyde Clarke, Esq. 



3. Transactions of the Society of Arts for 1838. 



The subject of lifjlit and colour is one of the most important which 

 now engacres the scientific world ; and in consequence of the sensation 

 cre.iteii by [iliotography, hardly a day elapses withnut snme new or 

 startling discovery. It is only, indeed, of late, and we hardly know 

 if we may say unanimously, that a theory of light has been adopted 

 which is at all satisfactory. Hypothesis and system, like the mar- 

 shalling- of an army, is the first step for the advancement of a science, 

 and we may well wonder, after so many brilliant discoveries made by 

 the greatest men, to find the science of light less advanced than 

 chemistry and geology, which are things of yesterday. This has 

 arisen primarily from the adoption of a bad system, which is tanta- 

 mount to no system at all, or worse; for until recently, the corpus- 

 cular theory, or that which teaches the direct procession of 1 ght from 

 the sun, ruled wiih all the weight which the name of its great patron, 

 Newton, could give to it. Its supporters also furgot the ]irinci|jles of 

 their master, the man who considered himself like a loiterer, picking 

 up pebbles on the shores of the vast ocean of science, and blindly 

 maintained the justice of his opinions, without any compunction that 

 he too might err; and it seems, indeed, a principle derived from the 

 weakness of human nature — that we must ever worship men, and (lot 

 truth. This ridiculous calling ourselves of Paul and of Cephas was 

 never perhaps carri.d to a more extraordinary length than when lately 

 before the Ashn)olean .Society a defence of Newton's opinions was 

 read, and it was endeavoured to be prov. d that he was a suppoiter of 

 those }irincijiles which now have the predominance. A blind lesult of 

 our wretched ignorance, that we cannot judge fur ourselves, but must 

 follow a leader, whom, if we had but judgment, we should know how 

 to be guided liy; but one error t(pund out, rather than again be exposed 

 to the consequences of our neglict, we dash our once- favoured idol on 

 the ground. Anotherimportant cause which has doubtless contributed 

 to the retardment of this sc ence has been the circumstance that it has 

 been courted primarily :)nd almost exclusively by mathematicians; 

 whereas, from its being thi- dispo.-ition of naturalists to observe, and of 

 mathematicians to re.ison, the wholesome course of a science is to col- 

 lect facts, in the first instance, and to arrange them afterwards. In 

 jjood truth, 0|ptics has been studied as by a foreigner, wIjo trusting 

 to his memory rather than liis knowledge, speaks English from a voca- 

 bulary, instead of with the freedom of common life. 



It is doubtless from this want of progress of the science, and from its 

 not having attained a jjopular and practical form, that we must attri- 

 bute that continued neglect of colour in decoration, which was first 

 caused by the puritanical destruction of the arts. Even the coin- 

 nionesr principles of contrast and hormony, which would not take an 

 hour's teaching in a common school, are not diffused, and it cannot be 

 astonishing if we sufTi'r from a universal ignorance in our houses and 

 our manufactures. The Egyptians, however, possessed by observa- 

 tion what neither science nor observation has taught us ; and although 

 they used only the simplest colours, yet the manner in wliieh they 

 ■were applied in their temples and in their tombs may justly excite our 

 admiration. Although so restricted in the number of their colours, 

 the Egyptians produced many bold effects, when they had compara- 

 tively no media to soften down their great masses. Harmony is the 

 general characteristic of Greek decoration, and, by the employment of 

 ■weak tints, they managed to attain great delicacy of expression. Blue, 

 from its coolness, they used very much in masses, and it greatly aided 

 the purity of their designs. They were very happy, too, in the 

 management of black and its contrasts, yellow and white, and used 

 them much more aptly in the decoration of objects than ws do. They 

 also made colour a handmaid to the sculptural aris, as may yet be seen 

 on some of the statues in the British Museum, and in other places ; 

 and they even mixed different coloured marbles for such objects, as the 

 leopard with black marble spots in the Museum at Naples. They 

 used painting also very extensively on the exterior of their 

 edifices, and with the most happy effict. Wiih regard to the man- 

 ner in which the Moors used this delightful vehicle of har- 

 mony, nothing can be more attractive than the specimens of their 

 internal decoration with which we are acquainted. We are happy to 

 see the increasing use of fresco, but we want more public examples, 

 such as may auimnte the public taste which already exists. The 

 painted ceilings at Greenwich and Hampton Court never fail to attract 

 the attention of the public, and there can be no doubt that they woi;ld 

 fully appreciate whatever might be done. No places can be more 

 appropriate for this improvement than the public museums, and how- 

 ever wretched may be their condition we still feel more comfortable in 

 the old rooms at the British Museum than in the barren walls of the 

 new. Tlie walls indeed should be a running commentary on the con- 



tents, like the Glyplotheca and the Pinacotheca, or like in the Palace 

 of the Conservatori, in the Capitol at Rome, where the.Roman statuary 

 is accompanied by friezes illustrative of the history of the republic. It 

 cannot be said that this would detract from the contents of the Museum, 

 as we have the example of the Louvre, where no one turns away from 

 the immortal works to the gorgeous ceiling. By this emplovment of 

 painters and sculptors an impulsive force would be given to "architec- 

 ture, and architects would more than regain what they might expend 

 in the first instance. The fine arts, indeed are not to be promoted like 

 the livers of French geese, by an artifical plethora of one member, nor 

 are they like a tree where the remaining limbs profit by the pruning 

 down of the rest, but they must be cultivated in common, and to neg- 

 lect any individual branches is to stiike at the roots and destroy the 

 nourishment of the rest. 



The operations of colour are determined by strict mathematical 

 laws, and colours possess, if it inay be so termed, an atomical constitu- 

 tion. Newton, it may be rememliered, determined by the prismatic 

 experiment that there were seven simple colours, because he could not 

 decompound any of them ; but practical artists had long rejected this 

 doctrine, from being able to produce the whole from three. Before the 

 determination of this question Mr. Hay liad performed some very 

 ingenious experiments, which he relates, by which he mixed the yellow 

 and red rays and produced orange, the yellow and blue green, and so 

 on through the others; thus producing by synthesis what Newton 

 could not effect by analysis. The subject has now been determined by 

 Sir David Brewster, and it is now taught that light is composed of only 

 three simple colours, yellow, red, and blue ; that if these be reflected 

 in their due proportion, which is in an active state, white is produced; 

 if absorbed, which is a passive state, black is the result. 



'Ihe powers of tliese, as determined by Field, are yellow, three ; 

 red, five ; and blue, eight. Mr. Hyde Clarke has given an analysis of 

 the prismatic spectrum, by which much the saiue result is produced. 

 Arranging the simple and compound colours under the heads of yellow, 

 red, and blue, and dividing them by twenty, the followuig is the 

 result : — 



These three simple colours, by their combination, form the secon- 

 dary, red and yellow, orange, 8; yellow and blue, green, 11 ; red and 

 blue, purple, 13. The simple colours are softened down by the secon- 

 daries which they form in combination with the other two colours, 

 yellow by orange and green ; red by orange and purple ; blue by green 

 and purple ; and they are contrasted by a combination of the two 

 colours, necessary to make up the triad, which forms the compliment of 

 the colour with IC ; as yellow 3 by green 13, Iti ; red 6 by green 11, 

 16; and blue 8 by orange 8, 16. The same principle prevails in 

 nature in many extraordinary phenomena, as, for instance, in that dis- 

 covered by Buffon, when if you look steadily for some time on a spot 

 of yellow colour, placed on a black orwhite surface, it will appear sur- 

 rounded by a purple tinge; and so in the phenomena of polarised light 

 also, if the ordinary ray be red or blue, the extraordinary ray will be 

 green or orange. Sir John Robison related before the French insti- 

 tute a remarkable instance of this contrasting power in nature : a 

 surgeon of his acquaintance bled a patient in a porcelain basin having 

 green flowers at the bottom, and some time afterwards it was observed 

 that on the surface of the blood were formed red flowers corresponding 

 to the green ; and this experiment was repeated several times to ensuj-e 

 its not being an accident. In music the same thing occurs, where 

 there are three simple notes, C E and G, and if any one of them be 

 .sounded it will be accompanied by the other two as the harmonics ; 

 this may be perceived in the sound of a bell in succession, and in an 

 accompaniment on the string of a violincello. From the combination 

 of the secondaries proceed the testiaries, orange and green form citron, 

 19 ; orange and purple, russet, 21 ; and green and purple, olive, 24. 

 These act with regard to the secondaries as the secondaries do to the 

 primaries, and their neutralising power is 32 : thus orange, 8, is con- 

 trasted by olive, 24; green, 11, by russet, 21 ; arrd prrrple, 13, by 

 citron, 19. Besides their perfect intensity, all the colours can be 

 raised towards darkness, which is called shade, and lowered towards 

 light, called lint ; and the compound colours have besides the variatioir 

 of hue, by which is meant a greater admixture of any of the compo- 

 sing colours — thus orange may be made from the yellowest to the red- 



