COLOURS AND DEPTH
- Warm and cool colours: Reynolds
Traditionally, warm colours are said to give a sense of volume, and cool colours to recede into the background. This tradition is reflected, among others, by Reynolds who discusses their relations to shadows:
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses (Discourse VIII, 1778)
Whether this principal broad light be in the middle space of ground, as in the school of Athens ; or in the sky ; as in the Marriage at Cana, in the Andromeda, and in the most of the pictures of Paul Veronese; or whether the light be on the groups; whatever mode of composition is adopted, every variety and licence is allowable: this only is indisputably necessary, that to prevent the eye from being distracted and confused by a multiplicity of objects of equal magnitude, those objects, whether they consist of lights, shadows, or figures, must be disposed in large masses and groups properly varied and contrasted; that to a certain quantity of action a proportioned space of plain ground is required; that light is to be supported by sufficient shadow; and, we may add, that a certain quantity of cold colours is necessary to give value and lustre to the warm colours: what those proportions are cannot be so well learnt by precept as by observation on pictures, and in this knowledge bad pictures will instruct as well as good. Our enquiry why pictures have a bad effect, may be as advantageous as the enquiry why they have a good effect; each will corroborate the principles that are suggested by the other.
Though it is not my business to enter into the detail of our Art, yet I must take this opportunity of mentioning one of the means of producing that great effect which we observe in the works of the Venetian painters, as I think it is not generally known or observed. It ought, in my opinion, to be indispensably observed that masses of light in a picture be always of a warm mellow colour, yellow, red, or a yellowish-white and that the blue, the grey, or the green colours be kept almost entirely out of these masses, and be used only to support and set off these warm colours; and for this purpose, a small proportion of cold colours will be sufficient.
Let this conduct be reversed; let the light be cold, and the surrounding colours warm, as we often see in the works of the Roman and Florentine painters, and it will be out of the power of art, even in the hands of Rubens or Titian, to make a picture splendid and harmonious.
- The Blue Boy
Gainsborough's Blue Boy (1770, predating Reynolds's discourse) is said to be part of this ongoing debate started in the 17th century, and to have been painted in order to show that cool colours could be placed as the main element, here the sitter.
