4! 
A PHOTOGRAPH IN NATURAL COLOURS. 
By J. TRAILL TAYLOR. 
J OHN RUSKIN somewhere says that he would rather have a 
good engraving than the best of coloured prints. He 
speaks of course of those copies of masters’ works which are 
produced with more or less approximation to fac-simile by the 
mechanical printing-press. And so far as many of these are 
concerned he may not improbably be in the right ; but there 
remains the fact that colour, to almost all eyes, is the life of a 
picture. The black shades that give the form at best put 
before us a thing that is cold and dead, and it is only when the 
glow of colour is brought out on face or landscape that its full 
charm can enter and possess the mind. Except in the case of 
those who are to some extent unsusceptible to the effects of 
hue, either through partial colour-blindness or from want of 
taste or education, this is so true that we are disposed to think 
that a very indifferently executed picture as to its tints may 
really carry higher meanings to its beholders than a mere image 
in black and white. Without colour it is not possible to have 
true harmony — such harmony as a summer landscape presents, 
for instance. Abstract from that landscape all its wealth of 
green, and what would then remain that would tell of the 
season or express its poetry? It might be either autumn or 
spring for aught its black and white might say. 
Colour, too, is one of the highest elements of expression in 
the human face, the pale lips speaking of fear or fixed resolve ; 
the flushed brow telling of anger, rude health, or the glow of 
hope. True, the engraver may manage with little subtleties to 
hint at some of these things, and the etcher sometimes shows 
a wonderful faculty for simulating colour, but the fact remains 
that colour is the life, and that without it we but half know 
what a face or a landscape has to say. 
With regard to photography, the immediate subject of our 
remarks, it is certain that the want of this element of pictorial 
beauty was very early felt. The chemicals had done so much ; 
could they not be made to do a little more, and catch the 
shifting hues of life in all their flush and glow ? A dream of 
