Yellow Is A Chief Constituent: Hence Brown Is In Some Measure To Shade

: ON THE SEMI-NEUTRAL, BROWN.

what yellow is to light. Hence, also, proper quantities of either the

three primaries, the three secondaries, or the three tertiaries, produce

variously a brown mixture. Browns contribute to coolness and clearness

by contrast when opposed to pure colours, and Rubens more especially

appears to have employed them upon this principle; although the same may

be said of Titian, Correggio, Paulo Veronese, and all the best

col
urists. Being a sort of intermedia between positive colours and

neutrality, browns equally contrast colour and shade. This accounts for

their vast importance in painting, and the necessity of preserving them

distinct from other colours, to which they give foulness in mixture; and

to this is due their use in backgrounds and in relieving of coloured

objects.



The tendency in the compounds of colours to run into brownness and

warmth is one of the common natural properties of colours which

occasions them to deteriorate or defile each other in mixture. Brown by

consequence is synonymous with foul or dirty, as opposed to fair or

clean; and hence brown, which is the nearest of the semi-neutrals in

relation to light, is to be avoided in mixture with light colours. Yet

is it an example of the wisdom of nature's Author that brown is

rendered, like green, a prevailing hue, and in particular an earth

colour, as a contrast which is harmonized by the blueness and coldness

of the sky.



This tendency will likewise explain the use of brown in harmonizing and

toning, as well as the great number of natural and artificial pigments

and colours so called. It was the fertility and abundance of browns that

caused our great landscape-colourist Wilson, when a friend went

exultingly to tell him that he had discovered a new brown, to check him

in his characteristic way, with--"I'm sorry for it: we have gotten too

many of them already." Nevertheless, fine transparent browns are

obviously very valuable.



If red or blue in excess be added to brown, it falls into the other

semi-neutral classes, marrone or gray. The wide acceptation of the term

brown has occasioned much confusion in the naming of colours, since

broken colours in which red, &c. predominate, have been improperly

called brown. That term, therefore, should be confined to the

semi-neutral colours, compounded of, or like in hue to, either the



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