the London National Gallery, called the " Consecration of St
Nicholas, " the kneeling figure of the saint is robed in green with
sleeves of golden orange. This latter colour is evidently carried
through as under painting over the whole draped portions of
the figure, the green being then floated over and so manipulated
that the golden tint shows through in parts and gives the high
fights on the folds.
Again the relation of the two kinds of pigment may be reversed, and the full-bodied ones mixed with white may be struck into a previously laid transparent tint. The practice of painting into a wet glaze or rubbing was especially characteristic of the later Flemings, with Rubens at their head, and this again, though a polar opposite to that of the Venetians, is also derived from the earlier tempera, or modified tempera, techniques. The older tempera panels, when finished, were, as we have seen, covered with a coating of oil varnish generally of a warm golden hue, and in some parts they were, as Cennino tells us, glazed with transparent oil paint. Now Van Mander tells us in the introduction to his Schilderboek of 1604, verse 17, that the older Flemish and German oil painters. Van Eyck, Dürer and others, were accustomed, over a slightly painted monochrome of water-colour in which the drawing was carefully made out, to lay a thin coat of semi-transparent flesh tint in oil, through which the under painting was still visible, and to use this as the ground for their subsequent operations. In the fully matured practice of Rubens this thin glaze became a complete painting of the shadows in rubbings of deep rich transparent oily pigment, into which the half-tones and the lights were painted while it was still wet. Descamps, in his Vie des pcintrcs flamands (Paris, 1753), describes Rubens's method of laying in his shadows without any use of white, which he called the poison of this part of the picture, and then painting into them with solid pigment to secure modelling by touches laid boldly side by side, and afterwards tenderly fused by the brush. Over this preparation the artist would return with the few decided strokes which are the distinctive signs-manual of the great master. The characteristic advantages of this method of work are, first, breadth, and second, speed. The under tint, often of a rich soft umber or brown, being spread equally over the canvas makes its presence felt throughout, although all sorts of colours and textures may be painted into it. Hence the whole preserves a unity of effect that is highly pictorial. Further, as the whole beauty of the work depends on the skill of hand by which the solid pigment is partly sunk into the glaze at the shadow side, while it comes out drier and stronger in the fights, and as this must be done rightly at once or not at all, the process under a hand like that of Rubens is a singularly rapid one. Exquisite are the effects thus gained when the under tint is allowed to peep through here and there, blending with the soUd touches to produce the subtlest effects of tone and colour.
Of these two distinct and indeed contrasted methods of handling oil pigment, with solid or with transparent under painting, that of the Flemings has had most effect on later practice. The technique dominated on the whole the French school of the i8th century, and has had a good deal of influence on the painting of Scotland. In general, however, the oil painting of the 17th and succeeding centuries has not been bound by any distinctive rules and methods. Artists have felt themselves free, perhaps to an undue extent, in their choice of media, and it must be admitted that very good results have been achieved by the use of the simplest vehicles that have been known -throughout the whole history of the art. If Rembrandt begin in the Flemish technique, Velazquez uses at first solid under paintings of a somewhat heavy kind, but when these masters attain to full command of their media they paint apparently without any special system, obtaining the results they desired, now by one process and now again by another, but always working in a free untrammelled spirit, and treating the materials in the spirit of a master rather than of a slave. In modern painting generally we can no longer speak of established processes and methods of work, for every artist claims the right to experiment at his will, and to produce his result in the way that suits
his own individuality and the special nature of the task before him.
§ 45. Water - Colour Painting. — (Cosmo Monkhouse, The Earlier English Water-Colour Painters, 2nd ed., London, 1897; Redgrave, A Century of Painters; and Hamerton, The Graphic Arts, contain chapters on this subject.)
Water-colour painting, as has been said, is only a particular form of tempera, in which the pigments are mixed with gum to make them adhere, and often with honey or glycerin to prevent them drying too fast. The surface operated on is for the most part paper, though " miniature " painting is in watercolour on ivory. The technique was in use for the illustrated papyrus rolls in ancient Egypt, and the illuminated MSS. of the medieval period. As a rule the pigments used in the MSS. were mixed with white and were opaque or " body " colours, while water-colour painting in the modern sense is mostly transparent, though the body-colour technique is also employed. There is no historical connexion between the water-colour painting on the vellum of medieval MSS. and the modern practice. Modern water-colour painting is a development rather from the drawings, which the painters from the 1 5th to the 17th century were constantly executing in the most varied media. Among the processes employed was the reinforcement of an outline drawing with the pen by means of a shght wash of the same colour, generally a brown. In these so-called pen-andwash drawings artists fike Rembrandt were fond of recording their impressions of nature, and the water-colour picture was evolved through the gradual development in importance of the wash as distinct from the line, and by the gradual addition to it of colour. It is true that we find some of the old masters occasionally executing fully-tinted water-colour drawings quite in a modern spirit. There are landscape studies in body-colour of this kind by Dürer and by Rubens. These are, however, of the nature of accidents, and the real development of the technique did not begin till the 18th century, when it was worked out, for the most part in England, by artists of whom the most important were Paul Sandby and John Robert Cozens, who flourished during the latter half of the i8th century. First the wash, which had been originally quite flat, and a mere adjunct to the pen outline, received a certain amount of modelling, and the advance was quickly made to a complete monochrome in which the firm outline still played an important part. The element of colour was first introduced in the form of neutral tints, a transparent wash of cool grey being used for the sky and distance, and a comparatively warm tint of brown for the foreground. " The progress of English water-colour, " writes Mr Monkhouse, " was from monochrome through neutral tint to full colour." Cozens produced some beautiful atmospheric effects with these neutral tints, though the rendering of nature was only conventional, but it was reserved for the second generation of English water-colour artists to develop the full resources of the technique. This generation is represented centrally by Thomas Girtin (1775-1802) and J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851), the latter of whom is by far the greatest representative of the art that has hitherto appeared. To Girtin, who died young and whose genius, like that of Masaccio, developed early, is due the distinction of creating water-colour painting as an art deahng with the tones and colours of nature as they had been dealt with in the older media. W. H. Pyne, a contemporary water-colour artist who also wrote on the art, says of Girtin that he " prepared his drawings on the same principle which had hitherto been confined to painting in oil, namely, laying in the object upon his paper with the local colour, and shading the same with the individual tint of its own shadow. Previous to the practice of Turner and Girtin, drawings were shaded first entirely through, whatever their component parts — houses, cattle, trees, mountains, foregrounds, middle-ground and distances, all with black or grey, and these objects were afterwards stained or tinted, enriched or finished, as is now the custom to colour prints. It was the new practice, introduced by these distinguished artists, that acquired for designs in water-colours upon paper the title of paintings."
