I seem to have noticed about these ways.

Yellow is not a colour that can be used in masses unless it be much
broken or mingled with other colours, and even then it wants some
material to help it out, which has great play of light and shade in
it. You know people are always calling yellow things golden, even
when they are not at all the colour of gold, which, even unalloyed,
is not a bright yellow. That shows that delightful yellows are not
very positive, and that, as aforesaid, they need gleaming materials
to help them. The light bright yellows, like jonquil and primrose,
are scarcely usable in art, save in silk, whose gleam takes colour
from and adds light to the local tint, just as sunlight does to the
yellow blossoms which are so common in Nature. In dead materials,
such as distemper colour, a positive yellow can only be used
sparingly in combination with other tints.

Red is also a difficult colour to use, unless it be helped by some
beauty of material, for, whether it tend toward yellow and be called
scarlet, or towards blue and be crimson, there is but little
pleasure in it, unless it be deep and full. If the scarlet pass a
certain degree of impurity it falls into the hot brown-red, very
disagreeable in large masses. If the crimson be much reduced it
tends towards a cold colour called in these latter days magenta,
impossible for an artist to use either by itself or in combination.
The finest tint of red is a central one between crimson and scarlet,
and is a very powerful colour indeed, but scarce to be got in a flat
tint. A crimson broken by greyish-brown, and tending towards
russet, is also a very useful colour, but, like all the finest reds,
is rather a dyer's colour than a house-painter's; the world being
very rich in soluble reds, which of course are not the most enduring