18 ON COLOUR. Part I. 



picturesque scenery in the same degree as ourselves*, I should 

 be sorry to imitate them in this particular. 



But that admiration of natiwe is distinct from a pre- 

 ference for landscape in painting; and its selection as the 

 favourite subject for art. Indeed the grandest scenes, most 

 admired in nature, are not always the best suited for a 

 picture ; the scenery of Switzerland is grand and commands 

 enthusiastic admiration, but it is not always suited for a 

 picture, from the great disproportion of the mountains to 

 the foreground ; and we must be satisfied to admire in nature 

 many scenes not to be transferred to canvas. 



Connected with this predilection for landscape is that 

 fondness for green already deprecated; and so habitual has 

 this predilection become, that we use the expression " copying 

 from nature," as if it only implied drawing, or painting, 

 landscape. It is in this too that some seek for every illus- 

 tration of colour, forgetting that what suits a landscape does 

 not necessarily suit a building, or any other work of art. 



14. It may be admitted, as Burnet observes, that the colours 

 to which the eye is accustomed in nature are those that are 

 to be sought for in a landscape-painting : " such as blue, 

 white, or gray in skies ; green, in trees and grass ; brown or 

 warm grey in earth, road, or stone." But this is a totally 

 different question from the treatment of pure, fiat, positive, 

 colours used for decorative purposes, where no "toning to 

 those hues most common in nature " is required, or admissible. 



The painting is a copy of nature, not so a building, or a 

 carpet. Attention to the due " equilibrium " may be neces- 

 sary in one as in the other ; but from the use of mixed, or 

 compound, hues in the former, and of positive or pure colours 

 in the latter, their treatment, as well as their effect, is very 



* I am not however disposed to think that the ancients were indifferent to 

 the beauties of natural scenery ; and I have no doubt that to Horace the 

 " domus Albunese resonantis, et prseceps Anio, et Tiburni lucus," were as 

 pleasing as they would have been to any of us. 



