NAMES
17
read that the “tone of the canvas is golden.” This cannot mean that each paint spot is the color of gold, but is intended to suggest that the various objects depicted seem enveloped in a yellow atmosphere. Tone is, in fact, a musical term appropriate to sound, but out of place in color. It seems better to call the brush touch a color-spot: then the result of an harmonious relation between all the spots is color-envelope, or, as in Rood, “the chromatic composition.”
“Intensity” is a misleading term, if chroma be intended, for it depends on the relative light of spectral hues. It is a degree rather than a quality, as appears in the expressions, intense heat, light, sound,—intensity of stimulus and reaction. Being a degree of many qualities, it should not be used to describe the quality itself. The word becomes especially unfit when used to describe two very different phases of a color,—as its intense illumination, where the chroma is greatly weakened, and the strongest chroma which is found in a much lower value. “Purity” is also to be avoided in speaking of pigments, for not one of our pigments represents a single pure ray of the spectrum.
Examples are constantly found of the mental blur caused by such unfortunate terms, and, since misunderstanding becomes impossible with measured degrees of hue, value, and chroma, it seems only a question of time when they will take the place of tint, tone, shade, purity and intensity.
Color schemes are now successfully transmitted by letter, telephone and telegraph by using the written scales or Notation of the Munsell Color Atlas. This seems to answer Stevenson’s appeal quoted at the beginning of the chapter.
