To most eyes the sign-manual of the impressionist is the blue shadow. And it must be admitted that too many impressionists have painted as if the blue shadow were the only distinguishing sign of the difference between the new and the old. The gallery-trotter, with eyes filled with dead and buried symbolisms of nature, comes upon Bunker's meadows, or Sinding's mountain-tops, or Larsson's sunsets, and exclaims, "Oh, see those dreadful pictures! Where did they get such colors."
To see these colors is a development. In my own case, I may confess, I got my first idea of colored shadows from reading one of Herbert Spencer's essays ten years ago. I then came to see blue and grape-color in the shadows on the snow. By turning my head top-side down, I came to see that shadows falling upon yellow sand were violet, and the shadows of vivid sunlight falling on the white of a macadamized street were blue, like the shadows on snows.
Being so instructed, I came to catch through the corners of my eyes sudden glimpses of a radiant world which vanished as magically as it came. On my horse I caught glimpses of this marvellous land of color as I galloped across some bridge. In this world stone-walls were no longer cold gray, they were warm purple, deepening as the sun westered. And so the landscape grew radiant year by year, until at last no painter's impression surpassed my world in beauty.
In terms of images, much of my life has been spent taking and printing black and white photographs. It is still second nature for me to look at a scene and see the values—the lights, darks and gradations between. Even though I’ve made a lot of efforts to focus entirely on color in images, I still do not really trust my eyes to see color the way a person would see color if they hadn’t spent years, decades even, thinking in terms of black and white and grays.
When I look at Impressionist paintings I enjoy the colors as much as anyone, but I’ve always wondered about the technical thinking behind Impressionism. Blue shadows and purple shadows, as a topic, is still discussed in pop instruction manuals for would-be impressionist painters. But I’ve read, and heard, amateur painters say that they don’t see colored shadows, however they do paint colored shadows because that is what they’ve read or been taught in workshops.
When I look at shadows I see them as values of gray. Or the local color of whatever object the shadow falls on but almost completely de-saturated and turned to a dark gray version of itself.
But then I don’t trust my own eyes.
Technology these days makes this kind of issue trivial.
Even with the most elementary tools, reality, such as it is, can answer the question of shadow color very definitively.
That’s what I did late this afternoon.
When the Sun was in the west—but before everything had turned sunset orange—I took a picture of a scene with very clear shadows and a very blue sky. And the shadows were falling on a very neutral-colored base. I didn’t try to tell a story or make a great composition, I just wanted to get a clear sky and a good shadow in the same image.
Here’s what I got. Notice I put two red circles on the image near the middle of the clear sky and toward the bottom in a shadow. (The bottom circle is on the chunk of concrete next to the dark shadow of the wall. There are little labels “A” and “B” next to the circles but I made the labels too small. And this is reduced in resolution for the blog, and the contrast is enhanced. But for my color tests I used the high-res, raw image. If you click on the picture it will get bigger.)
In Microsoft Paint, I simply used the magic eyedropper to sample the color from the sky inside the top circle and from the shadow on the concrete inside the bottom circle.
The results surprised me. But they wouldn’t surprise an experienced Impressionist.
Here is the result for the sky color:
It is clearly blue. It is bright, saturated and has a green bias, absolutely typical of the classic paint color cerulean blue that is often used to paint a sky.
Here is the result for the shadow color:
It is clearly blue, too! It is sampled from reasonably neutral concrete and it is almost exactly the same hue as the sky! It really couldn’t be more definitive. The differences, of course, are that the shadow color is less luminous, that is darker, and less saturated, that is less intense.
Isn’t that a cool little test?
The color of the illumination—blue skylight—became the local color of the shadowed object. It is very low in saturation and I believe it takes practice to “see” desaturated colors. But clearly the color is there to be seen.
And over a hundred years ago Hamlin Garland, in his passionate and enthusiastic way, captured the actual reality of the situation. The world is radiant around us and once we realize it, the world is something like real magic.
I’m going to end with that part of his quote again because it is so cool. Instructed, by art, if we pay attention and learn, art teaches us that the real world around us is infinitely more beautiful than anything any artist could capture.
Being so instructed, I came to catch through the corners of my eyes sudden glimpses of a radiant world which vanished as magically as it came. On my horse I caught glimpses of this marvellous land of color as I galloped across some bridge. In this world stone-walls were no longer cold gray, they were warm purple, deepening as the sun westered. And so the landscape grew radiant year by year, until at last no painter's impression surpassed my world in beauty.
