38 
House & Garden 
HOW TO HANDLE COLOR IN DECORATION 
The Second of Two Articles on What Colors Are 
and How to Combine Them 
A JAZZ band jazzing away full tilt is not 
a restful thing to listen to. Amusing, 
for a time, it may be, but no one could wish 
its cacophony for a steady diet, and after a 
while it would become unbearable. The rea¬ 
son? We might name several, but one will do 
to illustrate our point. The jazz wearies be¬ 
cause it is essentially restless and represents 
organized disorganization. It is essentially 
restless because there is nothing consecutive 
nor related about it; it is an anarchic jumble 
of sounds without any particular rhythm or 
any particular key. 
It is precisely the same with color. 
If we are so timid that we avoid 
color and stick to dull combinations 
without character^ we may get a re¬ 
sult perfectly safe and harmless, but 
likewise perfectly stupid and de¬ 
pressing—what someone has rather 
aptly designated a “symphony of 
mustard and mud.” If, on the other 
hand, we wish to do something in¬ 
teresting, and are willing to dare a 
bit, but don’t know what we are 
about, we are in danger of achieving 
a color jazz, a genuine chromatic 
catastrophe. 
It is plain, then, that to be suc¬ 
cessful our essays in color composi¬ 
tion must achieve harmony, and to 
achieve harmony we must have re¬ 
gard to scale and key. A piece of 
music is written in a certain key. That key— 
A major, G minor, or whatever it may be— 
has its known tonic, its dominant, and so on. 
Every note in the scale chosen has its definite 
relation to every other note and the composi¬ 
tion progresses % observance of these laws and 
relations of musical harmony. Now, it is just 
as necessary, in dealing with decoration, to 
have one predominating tone or key color as it 
is to have a piece of music written in one key. 
Having established that keynote of color, then 
we work up to it and build our scheme in a 
logical way with a definite object in view. 
T he adherence to a dominant color or tone 
in the composition of a room—the pre¬ 
servation of a color key—does not at all imply 
monotony or dullness of effect. There are 
plenty of ways of avoiding such things and of 
introducing relief. To begin with, the room 
may be composed in a high key or a low key, 
just as a voice may be pitched in a high or 
iow key, or a piece of music written in a bril¬ 
liant major scale or a subdued minor scale. 
Then there may be accents and contrasts. In 
short, there is no excuse for any color scheme 
being dull and stupid, no matter how law-abid¬ 
ing its creator may be. 
The term “harmony of colors” means that 
the kinds of colors put together in a combina¬ 
tion work well together and don’t jangle. This 
harmony may be arrived at in two ways. 
Either the colors have so much in common, 
both in the scale in which they are presented, 
and also in their actual physical composition, 
that they will not fall out; or else the colors 
are in such manner opposed to each other and 
so lacking in any common quality that each 
COSTEN FITZ-GIBBON 
acts as a foil to set off and emphasize the other. 
The first is called the harmony of analogy; 
the second is called harmony by contrast. 
Now begin to appear the possibilities of 
composition by adopting one key or tone of 
color and sticking to it as a guide in our 
elaboration. We may, if we choose, take a 
certain tone of brown as our color keynote. We 
may vary it by making some things a deeper 
brown and other things, again, a still deeper 
brown. Then we may get another touch of 
variety by employing lighter browns here and 
there, running the gamut of browns all the 
way up to light tan. Behold our “symphony 
of mustard and mud.” Safe, but about as 
deadly stupid as listening to someone play a 
tune on the pianoforte with one finger. Such 
treatment is a thing to avoid. 
Again, we may select a keynote of dominant 
color and, while keeping a preponderant body 
of it as a foundation, we may enliven the com¬ 
position by introducing, here and there, bits 
of related color that we know have affinities 
for the foundation and qualities in common 
with it—in other words, we may use as much 
variety as we choose, and yet have a harmony 
of analogy. We may be chromatically law- 
abiding and get a stupid result, or we may be 
law-abiding and achieve lively interest. Both 
are equally safe. It is a matter of personal 
choice. 
G oing a step further, we come to accents 
and contrasts as vivifiers. 
A man with clothes of a quiet tan might 
wear a tie of an orange shade. It would be a 
bit loud, but it would produce accent and liven 
the sartorial make-up, which would not have 
been the case if he had worn a tan tie. So a 
room with a similar dominant tan color would 
receive accent from an orange bowl full of 
nasturtiums or, perhaps, an orange screen. 
Without such accent, a keyed and related room, 
though harmonious, is apt to be insufferably 
monotonous and dead. 
But the man with a tan suit might better 
still wear a blue tie. So might the tan room 
have a blue bowl or some other blue object and, 
if the shade be right, the blue accent will have 
more value and variety than the accent of 
kindred color. This is because blue is the 
complementary or opposing color of orange and 
its related hues and each, therefore, gives value 
and quality to the other. I'rom these examples 
it is plain that there are two kinds of accent— 
the related accent and the opposing or con¬ 
trasting accent. 
The term accent means the addition of em¬ 
phasis. It is clear, then, that in the tan room 
we must not have too much orange or too much 
blue (either in mass or in a number of scattered 
objects), or instead of accent we should get 
only disturbance. It is also obvious that in the 
tan room we may have more of orange for em¬ 
phasis than we may properly have 
of blue, for the orange is related 
while the blue is opposing. 
T hese principles still hold if 
we reverse the combination. 
Take for example a bedroom in a 
country house, furnished with old 
mahogany, blue and white curtains 
at the windows, on the floor gray- 
blue rugs, matching in shade the 
blue of the curtains, the wallpaper 
a gray white with a small white pow¬ 
dered figure. The orange bowl of 
nasturtiums would have been the 
perfection of accent. In this scheme, 
in addition to the blue and orange, 
we have two other elements—white . 
and the mahogany tone of the furni¬ 
ture. White is not a color but 
(theoretically) the combination of all colors 
and, therefore, neutral, so that it conflicts with 
none and may be used with all. The mahogany 
tone is related to the orange and contrasts 
agreeably with the shade of blue. 
To the foregoing composition add a screen, 
whose dominant color is the same tone of blue, 
but it contains also green leaves and some other 
colors which, however, occupy less space than 
the blue and are pleasantly related or con¬ 
trasted. Our color harmony is still safe. Blue 
is the dominant or prevailing tone, but it is 
enlivened by opposing accent and by a mod¬ 
erate proportion of different but related colors. 
In other words, we have a room composed in a 
dominant or prevailing color and relieved by 
both harmony of contrast and harmony of 
analogy. 
This brings us to a point to be closely con¬ 
sidered. There are some people, even some 
decorators, who limit themselves too narrowly 
by laying out color schemes or “rhythmic 
notes” composed exclusively of varying shades 
of one color with, perhaps, only an accent 
added. Now, a room composed entirely in dif¬ 
ferent shades of one color does not present har¬ 
mony but monotony. Harmony is agreement 
between two or more different things, and to 
have harmony—in color, or music, or anything 
else—one must first have diversity so that the 
divers factors may agree. In music one can¬ 
not produce harmony by striking one note or 
its octaves. No more can one have harmony in 
color by playing successively the light and 
dark tones of one color. 
On the other hand, there are people, some 
of them decorators, too, ever ready to indulge 
in a riot of color without a sufficiently large 
As a nation, we are timid in our use of color, timid 
'probably because we do not know how to manage it. 
We may be diverted by colorist fads, but in our own 
homes most of us are too apt to shrink from what we 
fear is “daring.” If we would analyze every color 
scheme we see—and they are all about us—pick out 
what is good and what bad, and determine why it at¬ 
tracts or repels, we should gain a store of experience 
valuable for our own domestic use. Knowing the ground¬ 
work and principles, the next thing is for us to cast 
aside our timidity and get rid of the obsession that 
schemes, to be polite, should all be grayed and dulled. 
Such may be polite; they are also ancemic. 
