[Sidenote: Between Flat and Gradated Tones]

What has been said about the balance of straight lines and curves
applies equally well to tones, if for straight lines you substitute flat
tones, and for curved lines gradated tones. The deeper, more permanent
things find expression in the wider, flatter tones, while an excess of
gradations makes for prettiness, if not for the gross roundnesses of
vicious modelling.

Often when a picture is hopelessly out of gear and "mucked up," as they
say in the studio, it can be got on the right road again by reducing it
to a basis of flat tones, going over it and painting out the gradations,
getting it back to a simpler equation from which the right road to
completion can be more readily seen. Overmuch concern with the
gradations of the smaller modelling is a very common reason of pictures
and drawings getting out of gear. The less expenditure of tone values
you can express your modelling with, the better, as a general rule. The
balance in the finest work is usually on the side of flat tones rather
than on the side of gradated tones. Work that errs on the side of
gradations, like that of Greuze, however popular its appeal, is much
poorer stuff than work that errs on the side of flatness in tone, like
Giotto and the Italian primitives, or Puvis de Chavannes among the
moderns.

[Sidenote: Between Light and Dark Tones.]

There is a balance of tone set up also between light and dark, between
black and white in the scale of tone. Pictures that do not go far in the
direction of light, starting from a middle tone, should not go far in
the direction of dark either. In this respect note the pictures of
Whistler, a great master in matters of tone; his lights seldom approach
anywhere near white, and, on the other hand, his darks never approach
black in tone. When the highest lights are low in tone, the darkest
darks should be high in tone. Painters like Rembrandt, whose pictures
when fresh must have approached very near white in the high lights, also
approach black in the darks, and nearer our own time, Frank Holl forced
the whites of his pictures very high and correspondingly the darks were
very heavy. And when this balance is kept there is a rightness about it
that is instinctively felt. We do not mean that the #amount# of light
tones in a picture should be balanced by the #amount# of dark tones, but
that there should be some balance between the extremes of light and dark
used in the tone