Field's Chromatography: or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by ArtistsField, George
Science
Field's Chromatography: or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists
Field, George
Color; Colors; Painting -- Technique
sepia over green very agreeably subdues the force of the colour.
256. WARM SEPIA
is the natural sepia warmed by mixture with other browns of a red hue,
and is intended for drawings where it would be difficult to keep the
whole work of the same tint, unless the compound were made in the cake
of colour.
257. ROMAN SEPIA
is a preparation similar to the preceding, but with a yellow instead of
a red cast.
258. VANDYKE BROWN.
This pigment, hardly less celebrated than the great painter whose name
it bears, is a species of peat or bog-earth of a fine, deep,
semi-transparent brown colour. The pigment so much esteemed and used by
Vandyke is said to have been brought from Cassel; an assertion which
seems to be justified by a comparison of Cassel earth with the browns of
his pictures. Gilpin in his Essays on Picturesque Beauty, remarks that
"In the tribe of browns--in oil-painting, one of the finest earths is
known, at the colour shops, by the name of Castle-earth, or Vandyke's
brown." The Vandyke brown of the present day is a bituminous ochre,
purified by grinding and washing over. Apt to vary in hue, it is durable
both in water and oil, but, like all bituminous earths, dries tardily as
a rule in the latter vehicle. Clear in its pale tints, deep and glowing
in shadows, in water it has sometimes the bad property of working up:
for this reason, where it is necessary to lay on a great body of it,
the moist tube colour should be preferred to the cake. With madder red,
the brown gives a fine tint, most useful as a warm shadow colour; and
with Prussian blue, clear, very sober neutral greens for middle
distances. In banks and roads, Vandyke brown is the general colour for
dragging over the surface, to give roughness of texture: compounded with
yellow ochre, it affords a good ground tint, and with purple madder a
rich shadow colour. In sunrise and sunset clouds, a mixture of the brown
with cobalt yields a cold neutral green, adapted for those clouds at the
greatest distance from the sun. For foliage tints, aureolin, French
blue, and Vandyke brown, will be found of service; or as a glaze over
such tints, the yellow and the brown. With raw Sienna, brown madder,
Payne's gray, gamboge, and Roman ochre, this brown is useful. In a
water-colour winter scene, when the trees are denuded of foliage, the
net work of the small branches at the tops of them may be prettily given
with cobalt and Vandyke brown, used rather dry, and applied with a brush
having its hairs spread out either by the fingers or by drawing them
through a fine-tooth comb before working. Grass is likewise represented
readily by this means, and so are small trees on the summit of a cliff
or in like positions.
The Campania Brown of the old Italian painters was a similar earth.
259. VERONA BROWN,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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