delicate green, and then with gold; the browns in the foreground
became first more positive, and then were slightly mingled with other
local colors; while the touch, which had at first been heavy and broken,
like that of the ordinary drawing masters of the time, grew more and
more refined and expressive, until it lost itself in a method of
execution often too delicate for the eye to follow, rendering, with a
precision before unexampled, both the texture and the form of every
object. The style may be considered as perfectly formed about the year
1800, and it remained unchanged for twenty years.

During that period the painter had attempted, and with more or less
success had rendered, every order of landscape subject, but always on
the same principle, subduing the colors of nature into a harmony of
which the keynotes are grayish green and brown; pure blues, and
delicate golden yellows being admitted in small quantity as the lowest
and highest limits of shade and light: and bright local colors in
extremely small quantity in figures or other minor accessories.

196. Pictures executed on such a system are not, properly speaking,
works in _color_ at all; they are studies of light and shade, in which
both the shade and the distance are rendered in the general hue which
best expresses their attributes of coolness and transparency; and the
lights and the foreground are executed in that which best expresses
their warmth and solidity. This advantage may just as well be taken as
not, in studies of light and shadow to be executed with the hand; but
the use of two, three, or four colors, always in the same relations and
places, does not in the least constitute the work a study of color, any
more than the brown engravings of the Liber Studiorum; nor would the
idea of color be in general more present to the artist's mind when he
was at work on one of these drawings, than when he was using pure brown
in the mezzotint engraving. But the idea of space, warmth, and freshness
being not successfully expressible in a single tint, and perfectly
expressible by the admission of three or four, he allows himself this
advantage when it is possible, without in the least embarrassing himself
with the actual color of the objects to be represented. A stone in the
foreground might in nature have been cold gray, but it will be drawn
nevertheless of a rich brown, because it is in the foreground; a hill in
the distance might in nature be purple with heath,