stead of luminous ones,[42] and to enjoy, in
general, quality of color more than grandeur of composition, and
confined light rather than open sunshine: so that the really greatest
thoughts of the greatest men have always, so far as I remember, been
reached in dead color, and the noblest oil pictures of Tintoret and
Veronese are those which are likest frescoes.

159. Besides all this, the fact is, that though sometimes a little
chalky and coarse-looking body-color is, in a sketch, infinitely liker
Nature than transparent color: the bloom and mist of distance are
accurately and instantly represented by the film of opaque blue (_quite_
accurately, I think, by nothing else); and for ground, rocks, and
buildings, the earthy and solid surface is, of course, always truer than
the most finished and carefully wrought work in transparent tints can
ever be.

160. Against one thing, however, I must steadily caution you. All kinds
of color are equally illegitimate, if you think they will allow you to
alter at your pleasure, or blunder at your ease. There is _no_ vehicle
or method of color which admits of alteration or repentance; you must be
right at once, or never; and you might as well hope to catch a rifle
bullet in your hand, and put it straight, when it was going wrong, as to
recover a tint once spoiled. The secret of all good color in oil, water,
or anything else, lies primarily in that sentence spoken to me by
Mulready: "Know what you have to do." The process may be a long one,
perhaps: you may have to ground with one color; to touch it with
fragments of a second; to crumble a third into the interstices; a fourth
into the interstices of the third; to glaze the whole with a fifth; and
to re-enforce in points with a sixth: but whether you have one, or ten,
or twenty processes to go through, you must go _straight_ through them
knowingly and foreseeingly all the way; and if you get the thing once
wrong, there is no hope for you but in washing or scraping boldly down
to the white ground, and beginning again.

161. The drawing in body-color will tend to teach you all this, more
than any other method, and above all it will prevent you from falling
into the pestilent habit of sponging to get texture; a trick which has
nearly ruined our modern water-color school of art. There are sometimes
places in which a skillful artist will roughen his paper a little to get
certain conditions of dusty color with more ease than he could
otherwis