le color for laying broken shadows with, to be worked into
afterwards with other colors.

If you wish to take up coloring seriously you had better get Field's
"Chromatography" at once; only do not attend to anything it says
about principles or harmonies of color; but only to its statements
of practical serviceableness in pigments, and of their operations on
each other when mixed, etc.

[46] A more methodical, though under general circumstances uselessly
prolix way, is to cut a square hole, some half an inch wide, in the
sheet of cardboard, and a series of small circular holes in a slip
of cardboard an inch wide. Pass the slip over the square opening,
and match each color beside one of the circular openings. You will
thus have no occasion to wash any of the colors away. But the first
rough method is generally all you want, as, after a little practice,
you only need to _look_ at the hue through the opening in order to
be able to transfer it to your drawing at once.

[47] If colors were twenty times as costly as they are, we should
have many more good painters. If I were Chancellor of the Exchequer
I would lay a tax of twenty shillings a cake on all colors except
black, Prussian blue, Vandyke brown, and Chinese white, which I
would leave for students. I don't say this jestingly; I believe such
a tax would do more to advance real art than a great many schools of
design.

[48] I say _modern_, because Titian's quiet way of blending colors,
which is the perfectly right one, is not understood now by any
artist. The best color we reach is got by stippling; but this is not
quite right.

[49] See Note 6 in Appendix I.

[50] The worst general character that color can possibly have is a
prevalent tendency to a dirty yellowish green, like that of a
decaying heap of vegetables; this color is _accurately_ indicative
of decline or paralysis in missal-painting.

[51] That is to say, local color inherent in the object. The
gradations of color in the various shadows belonging to various
lights exhibit form, and therefore no one but a colorist can ever
draw _forms_ perfectly (see Modern Painters, vol. iv. chap. iii. at
the end); but all notions of explaining form by superimposed color,
as in architectural moldings, are absurd. Color adorns form, but
does not interpret it. An apple is prettier be