Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, June 1899: Volume LVVarious
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, June 1899: Volume LV
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
A common division of the spectrum is into warm and cold colors. The
warm colors are red, yellow, orange, and yellow-green; the cold colors
are violet, blue, green, and blue-green. This is not an arbitrary
division, but answers to a fact of experience which passes from our
physical to our moral impressions, and may cause in us feelings of
comfort or uneasiness, joy, sadness, or moral depression. Some persons
are influenced by the gray-colored sky, others are gay when the day is
bright. It is a current expression that the color of the southern
landscape is warm. Goethe said that blue caused him to feel cold.
The terms warm and cold are technical expressions in the arts. A color
tone is cooled by putting blue in it, and warmed by adding red or
yellow. "This practice is not arbitrary," says M. F. Bracquemond in
his book on Design and Color; "it copies the colored aspects which
natural light imposes on all imitation that seeks to realize the
colored and factitious light of painting. To reach this, art observes
the order according to which the natural lights distribute their
various colored elements, and classes luminous aspects--a process
which it has always observed--into the two categories of warm and
cold. Hence, so far as examples come to us, this contrast is easy to
verify; at the Louvre, for example, in works from Pompeii, and in
those of all the masters." Preyer relies upon this division of colors
into warm and cold for a comparison of chromatic sensations with
thermic, and for supposing that the color sense is developed from the
sense of temperature. Chromatic sensitiveness to this author is only a
special case of thermic sensitiveness limited to the retina. Darwin's
ideas were evidently the same; the whole human body was a sort of
retina capable of improvement; we may, it is true, suppose with Lord
Kelvin that "there is absolute continuity between the perception of
heat by the retina of the eye and its perception by means of the
tissues and nerves."
A very elementary experiment will easily enable us to recognize these
different qualities of colors. Set a lighted candle on a table near a
window; there are then two sources of light--the daylight, blue and
cold, and the light of the candle, orange-red and warm. Cast a shadow
on the white paper by holding a pencil straight up. The shadows cast
by the candle will be blue to a degree that no one can mistake it, a
greenish blue. Placing the pencil between the window and the candle
and looking at the shadows, we have, first, the blue shadow of the
candle, and then the shadow projected by the cold daylight. The color
of the last, though perhaps less evident than the other, is an
orange-yellow, of rich, warm tone.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account