While all this may be true, however, the most important question
has not yet been asked. Is truth of color in representative art
the same thing as beauty of color? It might be said that the
whole procedure of the so-called Impressionist school, in fact
the whole trend of the modern treatment of color, took their
identity for granted. Yet we must discriminate. Truth of color
may be truth to the local color of the given objects, alone or
together; in this case we should have to say that beauty did or
did not exist in the picture, according as it did or did not
exist in the original combination. A red hat on a purple chair
would set one's teeth on edge, in model or picture. Secondly,
truth of color may be truth to the modifications of the
enveloping light, and in this case truth would make for beauty.
For the colors of any given scene are in general not colors
which the objects themselves, if isolated, would have, but the
colors which the eye itself is forced to see. The bluish
shadow of an object in bright sunlight (yellowish light) is only
an expression of the law that in the neighborhood of a colored
object we see its complementary color. If such an effect is
reproduced in a picture, it gives the same relief to the eye
which the original effect showed the need of. The eye fatigued
with yellow sees blue; so if the blue is really supplied in the
picture, it is not only true, but on the road to beauty, because
meting the eye's demand. The older methods of painting gave the
local color of an object, with an admixture of white for the
lights, and a warm dark for the shadows; the modern--which had
been touched on, indeed, sporadically, by Perugino and Vermeer,
for instance,--gives in the shadow the complementary color of
the object combined with that of the light falling upon it--all