[Sidenote:  Between Warm and Cold Colours.]

One is tempted at this point to wander a little into the province of colour, where the principle of balance of which we are speaking is much felt, the scale here being between warm and cold colours.  If you divide the solar spectrum roughly into half, you will have the reds, oranges, and yellows on one side, and the purples, blues, and greens on the other, the former being roughly the warm and the latter the cold colours.  The clever manipulation of the opposition between these warm and cold colours is one of the chief means used in giving vitality to colouring.  But the point to notice here is that the further your colouring goes in the direction of warmth, the further it will be necessary to go in the opposite direction, to right the balance.  That is how it comes about that painters like Titian, who loved a warm, glowing, golden colouring, so often had to put a mass of the coldest blue in their pictures.  Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy,” although done in defiance of Reynolds’ principle, is no contradiction of our rule, for although the boy has a blue dress all the rest of the picture is warm brown and so the balance is kept.  It is the failure to observe this balance that makes so many of the red-coated huntsmen and soldiers’ portraits in our exhibitions so objectionable.  They are too often painted on a dark, hot, burnt sienna and black background, with nothing but warm colours in the flesh, &c., with the result that the screaming heat is intolerable.  With a hot mass of red like a huntsman’s coat in your picture, the coolest colour should be looked for everywhere else.  Seen in a November landscape, how well a huntsman’s coat looks, but then, how cold and grey is the colouring of the landscape.  The right thing to do is to support your red with as many cool and neutral tones as possible and avoid hot shadows.  With so strong a red, blue might be too much of a contrast, unless your canvas was large enough to admit of its being introduced at some distance from the red.

Most painters, of course, are content to keep to middle courses, never going very far in the warm or cold directions.  And, undoubtedly, much more freedom of action is possible here, although the results may not be so powerful.  But when beauty and refinement of sentiment rather than force are desired, the middle range of colouring (that is to say, all colours partly neutralised by admixture with their opposites) is much safer.

[Sidenote:  Between Interest and Mass.]

There is another form of balance that must be although it is connected more with the subject matter of art, as it concerns the mental significance of objects rather than rhythmic qualities possessed by lines and masses; I refer to the balance there is between interest and mass.  The all-absorbing interest of the human figure makes it often when quite minute in scale balance the weight and interest of a great mass.  Diagram XXVII is a rough instance of what is meant.  Without the little figure the composition would be out of balance.  But the weight of interest centred upon that lonely little person is enough to right the balance occasioned by the great mass of trees on the left.  Figures are largely used by landscape painters in this way, and are of great use in restoring balance in a picture.