or black. And in the general
imitation of the flesh tints the greatest artists have apparently
abandoned the task in despair, and contented themselves with a correct
utterance of form and expression, with well-harmonized darks and lights,
with little attention to the hues of Nature. Such was Caravaggio always,
and Guercino often, and all their respective followers. Such was Michel
Angelo, and often Raffaelle,--though at other times the color of
Raffaelle is not inferior in truth and glory to Titian, greatest of the
Venetian colorists: as in his portraits of Leo X., Julius, and some
parts of his frescos. But for the most part, though he had the genius
for everything, for color as well as form, yet one may conjecture he
found color in its greatest excellence too laborious for the careful
elaboration which can alone produce great results, too costly of time
and toil, the sacrifice too great of the greater to the less. Allston
was apparently never weary of the labor which would add one more tint of
truth to the color of a head or a hand, or even of any object of still
life, that entered into any of his compositions. Any eye that looks can
see that it was a most laborious and difficult process by which he
secured his results,--by no superficial wash of glaring pigments, as in
the color of Rubens, whose carnations look as if he had finished the
forms at once, the lights and the darks in solid opaque colors, and then
with a free, broad brush or sponge washed in the carmine, lake, and
vermilion, to confer the requisite amount of red,--but, on the contrary,
wrought out in solid color from beginning to end, by a painful and
sagacious formation, on the palette, of the very tint by which the
effect, the lights, shadows, and half-shadows, and the thousand almost
imperceptible gradations of hue which bind together the principal masses
of light and shade, was to be produced."

Here Mr. Ware undoubtedly errs in attributing the success of Allston's
flesh tints to the use of solid color alone. Such effects are not
possible without the aid of transparent colors in glazing; but it is the
judicious combination of solid with transparent pigments, combined not
bodily on the palette, but in their use on the canvas, that gives to
oil-painting all its unrivalled power in the hands of a master. Allston
was accustomed to inlay his pictures in solid crude color with a medium
that hardened like stone, and to leave them months and even years to dry
b