=The Color Sense.=--Therefore color is a thing to be striven for for its own sake. Good color is a value in itself. You may not have the genius to be a good colorist, but you need not be a bad one; for the color sense can be definitely acquired. I will not say that color initiative can always be acquired; but the power to perceive and to judge good color can be, and it will go far towards the making of a good painter, even of a great one.
I knew one painter who came near to greatness, and near to greatness as a colorist, who in twelve years trained his eye and feeling from a very inferior perception of color to the power which, as I say, came near to greatness. He was an able painter and a well-trained one before that; but in this direction he was deficient, and he deliberately set about it to educate that side of himself, with the result I have stated. How did he do it? Simply by recognizing where he needed training, and working constantly from nature to perceive fine distinctions of tone; and by careful and severe self-criticism. Summer after summer he went out-doors and worked with colors and canvas to study out certain problems. Every year he set himself mainly one problem to solve. This year it might be luminosity; next it might be the domination of a certain color; another year the just discrimination of tones--and he became a most exquisite colorist.
So, as I knew his work before and after this self-training, and as I know personally of the means he took to attain his purpose, I think I can speak positively of the fact that such development of the color sense is possible.
=Taste.=--It is well to remember that taste in color is not dependent on personal judgment alone; that what is good and what is bad in color does not rest on mere opinion. That a good colorist's idea of color does not agree with your own is not a matter of mere whim or liking, in which you have quite as good a right to your opinion as he has to his. The colorist, it is true, does not produce or judge of color by rule. He works from his feeling of what is right. But there is a law back of his taste and feeling. The laws of color harmony are definite, and have been definitely studied and definitely calculated. Color depends for its existence on waves of vibration of rays of light, just as sound is dependent on sound waves.