The values of the several colors probably disclose themselves in close connection with that of color contrast. Many of the likings of a child of three in the matter of flowers, birds, dresses, and so on, are clearly traceable to a growing pleasure in color contrast. Here again we must distinguish between a true chromatic and a merely luminous effect. The dark-blue sky showing itself in a break in the white clouds, one of the colored spectacles which delighted Miss Shinn's niece, may have owed much of its attractiveness to the contrast of light and dark. It would be interesting to experiment with children of three with a view to determine whether and how far chromatic contrast pleases when it stands alone, and is not supported by that of chiaroscuro.
I have reason to believe that children, like the less cultivated adults, prefer juxtapositions of colors which lie far from one another in the color circle, as blue and red or blue and yellow. It is sometimes said that the practice and the history of painting show blue and red to be a more pleasing combination than that of the complementary colors, blue and yellow. It would be well to test children's feeling on this matter. It would be necessary in this inquiry to see that the child did not select for combination a particular color as blue or yellow for its own sake, and independently of its relation to its companion—a point not very easy to determine. Care would have to be taken to eliminate further the influence of authority as operating, not only by instructing the child what combinations are best, but by setting models of combination, in the habitual arrangements of dress and so forth. This, too, would probably prove to be a condition not easy to satisfy.[1]
I have dwelt at some length on the first germs of color appreciation, because this is the one feature of the child's aesthetic sense which has so far lent itself to definite experimental investigation. It is very different when we turn to the first appreciation of form. That little children have their likings in the matter of form is, I think, indisputable, but they are not those of the cultivated adult. A quite small child will admire the arch of a rainbow and the roundness of a kitten's form, though in these instances the delight in form is far from pure. More clearly marked is the appreciation of pretty, graceful movements, as a kitten's boundings. Perhaps the first waking up to the graces of form takes place in connection with this delight in the forms of motion, a delight which at first is a mixed feeling, involving the interest in all motion as suggestive of life, to which reference has already been made. Do not all of us, indeed, tend to translate our impressions
- ↑ The influence of such authority is especially evident in the selection of harmonious shades of color for dress, etc. Cf. Miss Shinn, op. cit., p. 95.
