scheme of a picture. The old rule was, I believe, that
a picture should be two-thirds light and one-third dark. But I do not
think there is any rule to be observed here: there are too many
exceptions, and no mention is made of half tones.

Like all so-called laws in art, this rule is capable of many apparent
exceptions. There is the white picture in which all the tones are high.
But in some of the most successful of these you will generally find
spots of intensely dark pigment. Turner was fond of these light pictures
in his later manner, but he usually put in some dark spot, such as the
black gondolas in some of his Venetian pictures, that illustrate the law
of balance we are speaking of, and are usually put in excessively dark
in proportion as the rest of the picture is excessively light.

The successful one-tone pictures are generally painted in the middle
tones, and thus do not in any way contradict our principle of balance.

[Sidenote: Between Warm and Cold Colours.]

One is tempted at this point to wander a little into the province of
colour, where the principle of balance of which we are speaking is much
felt, the scale here being between warm and cold colours. If you divide
the solar spectrum roughly into half, you will have the reds, oranges,
and yellows on one side, and the purples, blues, and greens on the
other, the former being roughly the warm and the latter the cold
colours. The clever manipulation of the opposition between these warm
and cold colours is one of the chief means used in giving vitality to
colouring. But the point to notice here is that the further your
colouring goes in the direction of warmth, the further it will be
necessary to go in the opposite direction, to right the balance. That is
how it comes about that painters like Titian, who loved a warm, glowing,
golden colouring, so often had to put a mass of the coldest blue in
their pictures. Gainsborough's "Blue Boy," although done in defiance of
Reynolds' principle, is no contradiction of our rule, for although the
boy has a blue dress all the rest of the picture is warm brown and so
the balance is kept. It is the failure to observe this balance that
makes so many of the red-coated huntsmen and soldiers' portraits in our
exhibitions so objectionable. They are too often painted on a dark, hot,
burnt sienna and black background, with nothing but warm colours in the
flesh, &c., with the result that the screaming heat is intolerable. With
a