cularly so by adopting, as far as possible, the harmonic principles of the musician.

We must not quit our subject without remarking that there is a vicious extreme in this branch of Painting, and it is that in which colouring is rendered so principal, as by the splendour of its effects on the eye to diminish all other powers of a work upon the mind, or by want of subordination in the general design to overlay the subject; - no excellence of the mere colouring can in this case redeem from censure the performance of the painter. Add to which, there is a negative excellence which belongs to colouring, whence the painter is not always to employ pleasing and harmonious colours, but to take advantage of the powerful effects to be derived from impure hues, or the absence of all colour, as Poussin did in his

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Deluge," thus well commented on by Opie: "In this work there appears neither black nor white, neither blue, nor red, nor yellow; the whole mass is, with little variation, of a sombre grey, the true resemblance of a dark and humid atmosphere, by which every object is rendered indistinct and almost colourless. This is both a faithful and a poetical conception of the subject. Nature seems faint, half-dissolved, and verging on annihilation ***." But this want of colour is a merit of colouring, and not its reproach. Vandyke employed it with admirable effect in the background of a Crucifixion, and in his "Pieta;" and the

Phaëton of Giulio Romano is celebrated for a suffusion of smothered red, which powerfully excites the idea of a world on fire, although this artist, like his school, was deficient in the more subtile graces of colouring. Even discordance herein, as in music, must sometimes be introduced for effect and harmony. It is thus in poetry also that occasional rugged lines are essential to the harmony of flowing verse, to excite the reader by contrast, and to relieve the tedium and cloying of continued sweetness. In no case, however, is any thing legitimate in art that has not an authority in nature; and in Painting, as in Poetry, the imaginative must be founded on the true. Without this basis, effect falls into extravagance-grace into affectation beauty into deformity and the sublime into the ridiculous. Where truth and nature end, vice and absurdity begin; hence the moral influence of pure art, in which the habits of truth and honesty conduce to success, and are essential in a high degree to all the attainments of genius. The painter may, notwithstanding, deviate from the real into the ideal or abstract, even so far as in some instances to violate probability, but never to transcend possibility. To deviate successfully from objective truth presupposes, nevertheless, both judgment and genius in the painter; that is, the power of justly imagining and generalising.

Of the rank and value of this department of

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painting there will be, as there has been, variety of judgment and opinion, as there is variety in the powers of the of the eye and understanding: but take from Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, and other distinguished masters, the estimation of their colouring, and we fear that all that is left to them would hardly preserve their names from oblivion : nor can the art attain its appropriate end that "eye-pleasing perfection," so happily expressed by old writers on the art, without the excellence of colouring. Had it fallen to the lot of colouring in its perfection to have made its first appearance in the Florentine school, the chance is that it would have been ranked as the highest quality of the art; but, having attained the chief place in the inferior schools of Holland and Flanders, it has been degraded from its true rank through low association: - we had otherwise heard a different account thereof from both artists and critics.

To conclude, it is not in painting and decorating, in the sentiments it excites, nor in the allusions of poetry, nor in all these together, that the value of colouring is comprised; it has an intrinsic value, which, by augmenting the sources of innocent and enlightened pleasure, entitles it to moral esteem. We all know the delight with which music gratifies the ear of the musically inclined. The lover of art would not for worlds forego the emotion which arises from regarding nature with an artist's eye; — but he who can

regard nature with the intelligent eye of the colourist, has a boundless source of never-ceasing gratification, arising from harmonies and accordances which are lost to the untutored eye;-rocks and caves, every stone he treads on, mineral, vegetal, and animal nature, the heavens, the sea, and the earth, are full of them: wherever eye can reach or optical powers can conduct, their beauties abound in rule and order, unconfounded by infinite variety; and to assert that colouring permeates and clothes the whole visible universe, incurs no hyperbole.

CHAPTER II.

ON THE EXPRESSION OF COLOUR.

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Every passion and affection of the mind has its appropriate tint; and colouring, if properly adapted, lends its aid, with powerful effect, in the just discrimination and forcible expression of them; it heightens joy, warms love, inflames anger, deepens sadness, and adds coldness to the cheek of death itself."- OPIE's Lect. iv. p. 147.

Assured as we must be of the importance of colouring as a branch of painting, colours in all their bearings become interesting to the artist. This subject, considered in the whole breadth of its survey, appears to refer to the material principles of colours, to their sensible relations, and to their intellectual effects, or highest purpose.

We will first discuss the latter of these, which is the prime object of colouring, comprehending the effects of colours and colouring on the passions, sentiment, and affections of the mind, and may therefore be termed the Expression of Colour; a subject which, if it has not been totally without light, has been involved in much obscurity: and if artists and philosophers have hitherto argued respecting the causes and harmony of colours with little of the confidence of science, they have spoken