It almost always happens that _true but exaggerated colouring_ is more agreeable than absolute colouring; and that many persons who experience pleasure in seeing the modifications of exaggerated coloured light which a picture may exhibit, do not feel the same pleasure from the sight of a model, because the modifications corresponding to those which are imitated in excess are not sufficiently prominent to be evident to them. Besides the relish of the eye for an excess of an exciting cause, is essentially analogous to the inclination we have for food and drink of a pungent flavour and odour. 306. A painter may have perfectly seized all the modifications of light which bring forward the planes and the relief of objects; the modifications of the coloured light of his picture may be true, but the colours may not be those of his model. As in pictures in which there is a dominant colour, not found in the model, which is often called _the tone of such a picture, and the tone of such a painter_, if he uses it habitually. 307. We may form a very just idea of these pictures, by supposing the artist to have painted them while looking at his model through a glass of precisely the colour, to enable him to see the tint which predominates in his imitation. We may mention as an example, of this kind of imitation, a landscape painted from its reflection in a black mirror, the effect of which is very soft and harmonious. Thus we speak of brilliant or warm, cold or dull colouring. _Of Colouring in respect to the Harmony of the Colours of the various objects composing the Picture._ 308. The colouring of the picture may be _true or absolute_, and yet not agreeable in effect because the colours of the objects are not harmonious. On the contrary, a picture may please by the harmony in the local colours of each object, and by that of the colours of objects contiguous to each other, and yet may offend in its gradation of lights and shades, and by the _fidelity_ of its colours. In a word, it offends by _true or absolute_ colouring, while a picture in flat tints, the colours of which are perfectly assorted for the eye, although not those which belong to the objects imitated, produces, with regard to general harmony of colours, an extremely agreeable effect. 309. The general conclusion resulting from the analysis just made of the word colouring, is, that the epithet _colourist_ may be applied to painters endowed, in very different degrees, with the faculty of imitating coloured objects by means of painting.