Stranica 161 [161]
OCR
COLOURS IN RIPPLED WATER oz doubted brilliancy, and watch the breeze rippling the water in streaks or patches a few yards from us, and thus disturbing the image of the mountain on the opposite shore, we look in vain in the ripples for the added local colour, which we might have expected, and can detect nothing but a gleam from the sky above. Follow one of these streaks sideways, however, into the reflexions of the tall trees that line the bank close at hand, where the upturned faces of the ripples reflect the tree-tops and not the sky (so that there is no interruption of the dark image by bright sky light) and there the colour of the water itself, blue or green, as the case may be, can again be detected, affording an illustration of the fact that (as pointed out " on page 78) the local colour of water reveals itself most in the reflexion of dark objects. In Plate XX XIX, if the water were not too clear, its colour would in all probability appear in the more ruffled parts. But in Plate XX XVIII we could hardly expect the rippled water, which reflects the sky, to show more local colour than the smooth water, which reflects the dark hillside. If, however, the hill were high enough, or near enough, to cast an interrupted reflexion over the whole water, rippled and smooth, then again the local colour might be discerned in the rippled surface. These instances show how, under the complex conditions at which we have arrived in this final stage of our inquiry, it is impossible to give to the artist hard and fast directions, one effect often overpowering the other to such an extent that the latter is hardly perceptible. ; a i K s
