42 ON COLOUR. Paet I. 



29. Another error, greatly to be condemned, is the confusion 

 sometimes seen in blues and reds, which are made to appear 

 purple when seen at a distance. It has been fatal to many of 

 our modern windows, otherwise not devoid of merit. Among 

 the causes of this are the want of a sufficient quantity of yellow, 

 the improper arrangement of the reds and blues, and the 

 absence of other colours required to combine with them. 

 A yellow, or a white, fillet between the red and blue, or a spot 

 of the same placed on the centre, or at the junction of the 

 two, will obviate it ; though, as before shown, white has a poor 

 cold effect, and yellow is to be preferred, both for its richness 

 and for its completing the combination of the three primaries. 

 But in all instances of coloured decoration the different hues 

 should be so arranged in the general composition as to 

 prevent an undue and disproportionate effect of any one 

 colour. 



30. It sometimes happens that the pattern is allowed to run 

 from one light to another, half being on one and half on its 

 neighbour ; and this is very allowable, provided the figures 

 in a medallion, or in any other part of the same light, do not 

 cross from it into the adjoining one, the mullion cutting them 

 in half. It is often seen in windows of later periods, and 

 particularly in those of the 1400, and the following century, 

 when opaque stone mullions are allowed to pass through the 

 body of a man, or otherwise painfully to divide and interfere 

 with the subject. The fault arose out of the attempt to make 

 a large "painting" on glass, — an abuse which was suffered to 

 creep in towards the end of the 1300, and which ended in 

 producing all the defects of those grandiose windows so much 

 admired in Belgium and elsewhere, and which have fatally 

 interfered with the true principles of painted glass.* 



Like the splendid monstrosities of Louis XIV. and XV. in 



* As in PI. xcix. of Lasteyrie's " History of Glass-Painting," a window of 

 the seventeenth century in the Chartreuse de Molsheim, and many others. 



