have been informed, now variously composed of sepia and indigo or other blues, with madder or other lakes, and are designed for water-colour painting only, in which they are found extremely useful. And here it may be proper to mention those other pigments, sold under the name of tints, which belong to no particular denomination of pigments; but being compounds, the result of the experience of accredited masters in their peculiar modes of practice serves to facilitate the progress of their amateur pupils, while they are eligible in a like view to other artists. Such are Harding's and Macpherson's tints, usually sold ready prepared in cakes and boxes for miniature and water painting. These are composed of pigments which associate cordially; nevertheless, the artist will in general prefer a dependence upon his own skill for the production of his tints in painting.

III. ULTRAMARINE ASHES, Mineral Gray are the recrement of Lapis lazuli, from which ultramarine has been extracted, varying in colour from dull gray to blue. Although not equal in beauty, and inferior in strength of colour, to ultramarine, they are extremely useful pigments, affording grays much more pure and tender than such as are composed of black and white, or other blues, and better suited to the pearly tints of flesh, foliage, the grays of skies, the shadows of draperies, &c. in which the old masters were wont to

employ them. Ultramarine broken with black and white, &c., produces the same effects, and is thus sometimes carried throughout the colouring of a picture.

The brighter sorts of ultramarine ashes are more properly pale ultramarines, and of the class of blue; the inferior are called mineral grays.

IV. PHOSPHATE OF IRON is a native ochre, which classes in colour with the deeper hues of ultramarine ashes, and is eligible for all their uses. It has already been described under its appellation of blue ochre.

Slate clays and several native earths class with grays; but the colours of some of the latter, which we have tried, are not durable, being subject to become brown by the oxidation of the iron they contain.

V. PLUMBAGO. See Black Lead, which forms grey tints of greater permanence and purity than the blacks in, general use, and it is now employed for this purpose with approved satisfaction by experienced artists.

CHAPTER XXI.

OF THE NEUTRAL,

BLACK.

"If white and black blend, soften, and unite

A thousand ways, is there no black and white?"

Pope.

Black is the last and lowest in the series or scale of colours descending,—the opposite extreme from white, the maximum of colour. To be perfect it must be neutral with respect to colours individually, and absolutely transparent, or destitute of reflective power in regard to light; its use in painting being to represent shade or depths, of which it is the element in a picture and in colours, as white is of light.

As there is no perfectly pure and transparent black pigment, black deteriorates all colours in deepening them, as it does warm colours by partially neutralizing them, but it combines less injuriously with cold colours. Though it is the antagonist or contrast of white, yet added to it in minute portion it in general renders white more neutral, solid, and local, with less of the character

of light. Impure black is brown, but black in its purity is a cold colour, and communicates this property to all light colours; thus it blues white, greens yellow, purples red, and cools blue; hence the artist errs with ill effect in painting who regards black as of nearest affinity to hot and brown colours, and will do well to keep in mind—" The glow of sunshine and the cool of shade," and to preserve his depths without darkness. But he who takes his knowledge of colours from pictures, without regard to nature and philosophy, will be sure to escape originality, and to fail in practice as a colourist. It is the same in every other department of painting.

It is a fault of even some of the best colourists, as evinced by their pictures, to be too fond of black upon their palettes, and thence to infuse it needlessly into their tints and colours. With such it is a taste acquired from the study of old pictures : but in nature hardly any object above ground is black, nor are any rendered neutral by black in daylight; although black minerals abound, and the objects of vegetal and animal nature may be blackened through every degree of impurity by the action of fire. Black should, therefore, be reserved for a local colour, or employed only in the underpainting properly called grounding and dead colouring; except shadow cannot be gotten without it, for want of adequate pigments: but the chiaroscuro of black and white is always offensive to

just chromatic harmony. Nevertheless this rule is regulative, and not absolute in practice.

As a local colour in a picture, it has the effect of connecting or amassing surrounding objects, and it is the most retiring of all colours, which property it communicates to other colours in mixture. It heightens the effect of warm as well as light colours, by a double contrast when opposed to them, and in like manner subdues that of cold and deep colours; but in mixture or glazing these effects are reversed, as we have already said, by reason of the predominance of cold colour in the constitution. of black having therefore the double office of colour and of shade, black is perhaps the most important of all colours to the artist, both as to its use and avoidance.

Black is to be considered as a synthesis of the three primary colours, the three secondaries, or the three tertiaries, or of all these together; and, consequently, also of the three semi-neutrals, and may accordingly be composed of due proportions of either tribe or triad. All antagonist colours, or contrasts, also afford the neutral black by composition; but in all the modes of producing black by compounding colours, blue is to be regarded as its archeus, or predominating colour, and yellow as subordinate to red, in the proportions, when their hues are true, of eight blue, five red, and three yellow. It is owing to this predominance of blue in the constitution of black, that it contributes by