will aver that if the colour is right the values must be right too.
However plausible this theory may seem, the practice of those who hold
it amply demonstrates its untruth. It is interesting and instructive
to notice how those who seek the colour without regard for the values
inherent in the colouring matter never succeed in producing more than
a certain shallow superficial brilliancy; the colour of such painters
is never rich or profound, and although it may be beautiful, it is
always wanting in the element of romantic charm and mystery.

The colour is the melody, the values are the orchestration of the
melody; and as the orchestration serves to enrich the melody, so do
the values enrich the colour. And as melody may--nay, must--exist, if
the orchestration be really beautiful, so colour must inhere wherever
the values have been finely observed. In Rembrandt, the colour is
brown and a white faintly tinted with bitumen; in Claude, the colour
is blue, faintly flushed with yellow in the middle sky, and yet none
has denied the right of these painters to be considered colourists.
They painted with the values--that is to say, with what remains on the
palette when abstraction has been made of the colouring matter--a
delicate neutral tint of infinite subtlety and charm; and it is with
this, the evanescent and impalpable soul of the vanished colours, that
the most beautiful pictures are painted. Corot, too, is a conspicuous
example of this mode of painting. His right to stand among the world's
colourists has never, so far as I know, been seriously contested, his
pictures are almost void of colouring matter--a blending of grey and
green, and yet the result is of a richly coloured evening.

Corot and Rembrandt, as Dutilleux pointed out, arrived at the same
goal by absolutely different ends. He saw clearly, although he could
not express himself quite clearly, that, above all painters, Rembrandt