ck exist only in theory . Even a surface that appears to be white to us has the slightest tint of yellow, purple or red; likewise, even the dimmest black has tints of colour in it.It was the awareness of all these details that led the Impressionists into excluding black from their paintings; discard earthly tones and deal almost solely with the seven colours that comprise the solar spectrum. This change, that was about to turn into a revolution in painting, was most profoundly exhibited in the depiction of shadows. Painters of the past would have questioned the inclination of the colour grey towards black or white; the Impressionists questioned whether it was a bluish, greenish, or reddish grey. Colours were no longer thought of as dark and light, or as warm and cool. What interested them was their relation to primary (yellow, blue) and complementary (green, orange, indigo, and violet) hues . This view of nature was emphasised by Monet, Pissaro and Renoir, although Delacroix had foretold Impressionism when he described the faces of two Moroccan boys as ‘[the]…yellow-complexioned [one] had violet shadows; the ruddy-faced one, green shadows.’ The Impressionists shocked the public with the way they placed colour on their canvas, though Watteau and Constable had already made use of broken colour to give variety to a painting, and praised from Chardin and Reynolds . As we have seen, by the late nineteenth century much more was known about how colours work together and influence one another. Monet uses primary and complementary colours in Rose Path at Giverny. By piling the colours one on top of the other separately, Monet makes them react to one another so that they appear to shimmer and sparkle. There is a visual reference to perspective in the ochre and orange foreground, but essentially any sense of the distance is carried by in the recessive blues and purples, which dominate in the central section of the painting, and ...
