Often when a picture is hopelessly out of gear and “mucked up,” as they say in the studio, it can be got on the right road again by reducing it to a basis of flat tones, going over it and painting out the gradations, getting it back to a simpler equation from which the right road to completion can be more readily seen.  Overmuch concern with the gradations of the smaller modelling is a very common reason of pictures and drawings getting out of gear.  The less expenditure of tone values you can express your modelling with, the better, as a general rule.  The balance in the finest work is usually on the side of flat tones rather than on the side of gradated tones.  Work that errs on the side of gradations, like that of Greuze, however popular its appeal, is much poorer stuff than work that errs on the side of flatness in tone, like Giotto and the Italian primitives, or Puvis de Chavannes among the moderns.

[Sidenote:  Between Light and Dark Tones.]

There is a balance of tone set up also between light and dark, between black and white in the scale of tone.  Pictures that do not go far in the direction of light, starting from a middle tone, should not go far in the direction of dark either.  In this respect note the pictures of Whistler, a great master in matters of tone; his lights seldom approach anywhere near white, and, on the other hand, his darks never approach black in tone.  When the highest lights are low in tone, the darkest darks should be high in tone.  Painters like Rembrandt, whose pictures when fresh must have approached very near white in the high lights, also approach black in the darks, and nearer our own time, Frank Holl forced the whites of his pictures very high and correspondingly the darks were very heavy.  And when this balance is kept there is a rightness about it that is instinctively felt.  We do not mean that the #amount# of light tones in a picture should be balanced by the #amount# of dark tones, but that there should be some balance between the extremes of light and dark used in the tone scheme of a picture.  The old rule was, I believe, that a picture should be two-thirds light and one-third dark.  But I do not think there is any rule to be observed here:  there are too many exceptions, and no mention is made of half tones.

Like all so-called laws in art, this rule is capable of many apparent exceptions.  There is the white picture in which all the tones are high.  But in some of the most successful of these you will generally find spots of intensely dark pigment.  Turner was fond of these light pictures in his later manner, but he usually put in some dark spot, such as the black gondolas in some of his Venetian pictures, that illustrate the law of balance we are speaking of, and are usually put in excessively dark in proportion as the rest of the picture is excessively light.

The successful one-tone pictures are generally painted in the middle tones, and thus do not in any way contradict our principle of balance.