epest shades
are void spaces from which no light whatever is reflected to the eye;
ours are black surfaces from which, paint as black as we may, a great
deal of light is still reflected, and which, placed against one of
nature's deep bits of gloom, would tell as distinct light. Here we are
then, with white paper for our highest light, and visible illumined
surface for our deepest shadow, set to run the gauntlet against nature,
with the sun for her light, and vacuity for her gloom. It is evident
that _she_ can well afford to throw her material objects dark against
the brilliant aerial tone of her sky, and yet give in those objects
themselves a thousand intermediate distances and tones before she comes
to black, or to anything like it--all the illumined surfaces of her
objects being as distinctly and vividly brighter than her nearest and
darkest shadows, as the sky is brighter than those illumined surfaces.
But if we, against our poor, dull obscurity of yellow paint, instead of
sky, insist on having the same relation of shade in material objects, we
go down to the bottom of our scale at once; and what in the world are we
to do then? Where are all our intermediate distances to come from?--how
are we to express the aerial relations among the parts themselves, for
instance, of foliage, whose most distant boughs are already almost
black?--how are we to come up from this to the foreground, and when we
have done so, how are we to express the distinction between its solid
parts, already as dark as we can make them, and its vacant hollows,
which nature has marked sharp and clear and black, among its lighted
surfaces? It cannot but be evident at a glance, that if to any one of
the steps from one distance to another, we give the same quantity of
difference in pitch of shade which nature does, we must pay for this
expenditure of our means by totally missing half a dozen distances, not
a whit less important or marked, and so sacrifice a multitude of truths,
to obtain one. And this, accordingly was the means by which the old
masters obtained their (truth?) of tone. They chose those steps of
distance which are the most conspicuous and noticeable--that for
instance from sky to foliage, or from clouds to hills--and they gave
these their precise pitch of difference in shade with exquisite accuracy
of imitation. Their means were then exhausted, and they were obliged to
leave their trees flat masses of mere filled-up outline, and to omit
the