Harold Speed Chapter 7: Colour

Today we'll take a look at Chapter 7: "Colour" from Harold Speed's 1924 art instruction book Oil Painting Techniques and Materials.

I'll present Speed's main points in boldface type either verbatim or paraphrased, followed by comments of my own. If you want to add a comment, please use the numbered points to refer to the relevant section of the chapter.

Speed divides three approaches to color. They're listed in historical order, but without saying that one is necessarily better than another. Speed acknowledges the beauty of each way of looking at color, similar to the way that the smaller orchestras of earlier music produced sonorities as valid as the big orchestras of later composers.

1. Primitive colouring
"Consists in simply filling in the boundaries of objects and background with their local colour and expressing the internal forms by the introduction of a little shading." No cast shadows, no colored light. Examples: most Asian artwork, plus Giotto and Fra Angelico up to Botticelli in Europe.
Advantages: clarity of expression, but less impact of form and less realism.

2. The Brown School
Introduction of light and shade, 3D form. The brown tone is a convention that unifies the otherwise jarring contrasts. Joshua Reynolds (above) states that shadows should be brown color. I've heard this referred to as "brown soup." Many of the impressionists reacted against this brownish tone when they went outside and saw a more silvery or variegated light.

But in the credit given to the French Impressionists, other pioneers are often overlooked. The insights and practices of the late 19th century outdoor painters were anticipated decades or even centuries earlier by other artists such as Velazquez and Vermeer, as Speed points out. In the case of Velazquez (below), the colors are fairly quiet and neutral, and it is the organization of value and the handling of edges that contribute to the sense of unified vision.

3. Impressionist School
This is an outgrowth of the optical science of the nineteenth century. One of the key ideas is the dissociation of apparent color from the local color of surfaces.

Another set of ideas had to do with the science of vision, and the recognition that color is a phenomenon of perception as much as it is something external. Goethe was a pioneer in this.

Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, 1836 (Dusseldorf School)

In the realm of landscape, I would also add that early outdoor painters in Italy, Germany, Scandinavia, England, and America preceded many of the color innovations of the more famous French Impressionists.

Painting by Harold Speed

4. Importance of consistency
Speed points out the problem of putting a figure that is lit with indoor studio light into an outdoor background setting. (I don't have a good example of this offhand....any suggestions?)

Childe Hassam

5. Elimination of black from the palette. 
This is a topic that I've discussed in a previous series:

Part 1: Using black to darken a color

Part 2: Mixing your own black
Part 3: Using black in a painting
Part 4: Is Black a color?

Speed's coverage of it is nuanced, warning of the dangers of the "fruit salad" coloring, but also reminding us of the power of darkness and shadow, which was sometimes lost in impressionist coloring.

Next week—Chapter 8: Colour: Practical

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In its original edition, the book is called "The Science and Practice of Oil Painting." Unfortunately it's not available in a free edition, but there's an inexpensive print edition that Dover publishes under a different title "Oil Painting Techniques and Materials (with a Sargent cover)," and there's also a Kindle edition.
Get my book "Color and Light" signed from my website or from Amazon.

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