The Division of the Tones

The Speaker, 10 September 1892, pages 316-317, ​​2,000 words

Many claims are put forward, but the best founded is that of Seurat; and, so far as my testimony may serve his greater honour and glory, I do solemnly declare that I believe him to have been the original discoverer of the division of the tones.

A tone is a combination of colours. In Nature, colours are separate; they act and react one on the other, and so create in the eye the illusion of a mixture of various colours – in other words, of a tone. But if the human eye can perform this prodigy when looking on colour as evolved through the spectacle of the world, why should not the eye be able to perform the same prodigy when looking on colour as displayed over the surface of a canvas? Nature does not mix her colours to produce a tone; and the reason of the marked discrepancy existing between Nature and the Louvre is owing to the fact that painters have hitherto deemed it a necessity to prepare a tone on the palette before placing it on the canvas; whereas it is quite clear that the only logical and reasonable method is to first complete the analysis of the tone, and then to place the colours which compose the tone in dots over the canvas, varying the size of the dots and the distance between the dots according to the depth of colour desired by the painter. If this be done truly – that is to say, if the first analysis of the tones be a correct analysis – and if the spectator places himself at the right distance from the picture, there will happen in his eyes exactly the same blending of colour as happens in them when they are looking upon Nature.

Truly a subject difficult to write about in English. Perhaps it is one that should not be attempted anywhere except in a studio with closed doors. But if I did not make some attempt to explain this matter, I should leave my tale of the decline and fall of French art in the nineteenth century incomplete. Maybe, an example will make my meaning clear. Let us imagine ourselves in a club smoking-room. The walls are a rich ochre. There are three or four men sitting between us and the wall, and the blue smoke of their cigars fills the middle air. In painting this scene it would be usual to prepare the tone on the palette, and the preparation would be somewhat after this fashion: ochre warmed with a little red, with a pale violet tinted with lake for the smoke of the cigars. But such a method of painting would seem to Seurat and Signac to be artless, primitive, unscientific, childish, presque du Louvre – above all, unscientific. They would say, "Decompose the tone. That tone is composed of yellow, white, and violet turning towards lake;" and, having satisfied themselves in what proportions, they would dot their canvases over with pure yellow and pure white, the interspaces being filled in with touches of lake and violet, numerous where the smoke is thickest, diminishing in number where the wreaths vanish into air. Or let us suppose that it is a blue slated roof that the dottist wishes to paint. He first looks behind him, to see what is the colour of the sky. It is an orange sky. He therefore represents the slates by means of blue dots intermixed with orange and white dots, and – ah! I am forgetting an important principle in the new method – the complementary colour which the eye imagines, but does not see. What is the complementary colour of blue, grey, and orange? Green. Therefore green must be introduced into the roof; otherwise the harmony would be incomplete, and therefore in a measure discordant. Needless to say that a sky painted in this way does not bear looking into. Until the spectator retires to a distance, it presents the appearance of a pard; but when he reaches the proper distance, there is no denying that the colours do in a measure unite and assume a tone more or less equivalent to the tone that would have been obtained by blending the colours on the palette. "But," cry Seurat and Signac, "an infinitely purer and more beautiful tone than could have been obtained by any artificial blending of the colours on the palette – a tone that is the exact equivalent of one of Nature's tones, for it has been obtained in exactly the same way."

It must not be imagined that these theories are confined to a few obscure fanatics. The schools headed by Signac and Auguetin comprise numerous disciples and adherents. They do not exhibit in the Salon or in the Champ de Mars; but that is because they disdain to do so. They hold exhibitions of their own, and their picture-dealers trade only in their works and in those belonging to or legitimately connected with the new schools. Roughly speaking, these new schools – the symbolists, the decadents, the dividers of tones, the professors of the rhythm of gesture – date back about ten years. For ten years the division of the tones has been the subject of discussion in the aesthetic circles of Montmartre. And when we penetrate further into the matter – or, to be more exact, as we ascend into the higher regions of La Butte – we find the elect who form so stout a phalanx against the philistinism of the Louvre, themselves subdivided into numerous sections, and distraught with internecine feuds concerning the principle of the art which they pursue with all the vehemence that Veronese green and cadmium-yellow are capable of. From ten at night till two in the morning the brasseries of the Butte are in session. Ah! the interminable bocks and the reek of the cigars, until at last a hesitating exodus begins. An exhausted proprietor at the head of his waiters, crazed with sleepiness, eventually succeeds in driving these noctambulist apostles into the streets. Then the nervous lingering at the corner! There the disputants, anxious and yet loth to part, part, each regretting, after having made a few steps, that he had not urged some fresh argument – an argument which had just occurred to him, and which, he feels sure, would have reduced his opponent to impotent silence. Sometimes the partings are stormy. The question of the introduction of the complementary colours into the frames of the pictures is always a matter of strife, and results in much nonconformity. Several are strongly in favour of carrying the complementary colours into the picture-frames. "If you admit," says one, "that to paint a blue roof with an orange sky shining on it you must introduce the complementary colour green – which the spectator does not see, but imagines – there is excellent reason why you should dot the frame all over with green, for the picture and its frame are not two things, but one thing." "But," cries his opponent, "there is a finality in all things; if you carry your principle out to the bitter end, the walls as well as the frame should be dotted with the complementary colours, the staircases too, the streets likewise; and if we pursue the complementaries into the street, who shall say where we are to stop? Why stop at all, unless the neighbours protest that we are interfering with their complementaries?"

If I have succeeded in explaining the principle of coloration employed by these painters, I must have excited some curiosity in the reader to see these scientifically-painted pictures. To say that they are strange, absurd, ridiculous, conveys no sensation of their extravagances; and I think that even an elaborate description would miss its mark. For, in truth, the pictures merit no such attention. It is only needful to tell the reader that they fail most conspicuously at the very point where it was their mission to succeed. Instead of excelling in brilliancy of colour the pictures painted in the ordinary way, they present the most complete spectacle of discoloration possible to imagine. Signac is a man of talent, and in an exhibition of pictures which I visited Iast May I saw a wide bay, two rocky headlands extending far into the sea, and this offing was filled with a multitude of gull-like sails. There was in it a vibration of light, such an effect as a mosaic composed of dim-coloured but highly polished stones might produce. I can say no good word, however, for his portrait of a gentleman holding his hat in one hand and a flower in the other. This picture formulated a still newer aestheticism – the rhythm of gesture. For, according to Signac, the raising of the face and hands expresses joy, the depression of the face and hands denotes sadness. Therefore, to denote the melancholy temperament of his sitter, Signac represented him as being hardly able to lift his hat to his head or the flower to his button-hole. The figure was painted, as usual, in dots of pure colour lifted from the palette with the point of the brush; the complementary colours in duplicate bands curled up the background. This was considered by the disciples to be an important innovation; and the effect, it is needless to say, was gaudy, if not neat. A theory of Auguetin's is that wherever the painter is painting, his retina must still hold some sensation of the place he has left; therefore there is in every scene not only the scene itself, but remembrance of the scene that preceded it. This is not quite clear, is it? No. But I think I can make it clear. He who walks out of a brilliantly lighted saloon – that is to say, he who walks out of yellow – sees the other two primary colours, red and blue; in other words, he sees violet. Therefore Anguetin paints the street, and everything in it, violet – boots, trousers, hats, coats, lamp-posts, paving-stones, and the tail of the cat disappearing under the porte cocher.

Some of my readers will wonder why I have devoted so much space to describing the doings of such incredibly stupid people. Pardon me, the people I have described are the very reverse of stupid, and their doings are not more foolish than the hundred and one artistic notions which have been undermining the art-sense of the French and English nations for the last twenty years. What I have described is not more foolish than the stippling at South Kensington or the drawing by the masses at Julien's. The theory of the division of the tones is no more foolish than the theory of plein air or the theory of the square brush work; it is as foolish, but not a jot more foolish.

Great art dreams, imagines, sees, feels, expresses – reasons never. It is only in times of woful decadence, like the present, that the bleating of the schools begins to be heard; and although, to the ignorant, one method may seem less ridiculous than another, all methods – I mean, all methods that are not part and parcel of the pictorial intuition – are equally puerile and ridiculous. The separation of the method of expression from the idea to be expressed is the sure sign of decadence. France is now all decadence. In the Champ de Mars, as in the Salon, the man of the hour is he who has invented the last trick in subject or treatment. France has produced great

artists in quick succession. Think of all the great names, beginning with Ingres and ending with Degas, and wonder if you can that France has at Iast entered on a period of artistic decadence. For the last sixty years the work done in literary and pictorial art has been immense; the soil has been worked along and across, in every direction; and for many a year nothing will come to us from France but the bleat of the scholiast. G.M.