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Updated: July 20, 2025
Without these steadying influences these compositions of gradated masses would be sickly and weak. Corot: 2470 Collection Chauchard, Louvre. This is a typical example of Corot's tone scheme, and little need be added to the description already given. Infinite play is got with the simplest means.
Leonardo's instructions for shading off a light sky will occur to any one who studies the finely gradated tints mingling with the clouds around the celestial group. But grand as the fresco is, and interesting as it must have been to the artist at this time, when thoughts of Savonarola mingled with every stroke, he felt he was not fulfilling his true mission in the world.
One may be too careful in gradating the tints: timidity in this respect prevails too much among modern needlewomen: an artist in floss should not want her work to look like a gradated wash of colour. When laid floss is kept in place by threads themselves sewn down across it, such threads are called "couched," and the work itself may be described as laid and couched.
The more natural way of shading is to let the stitches follow the lines of the drawing, and so make use of them to express form, as with the strokes of the pen or pencil upon paper. The term "long-and-short-stitch" is frequently used by way of describing the stitch. It does not, as I have said, help us much. And this, in the case of gradated colour, makes the shading softer.
These two examples ought, I think, to satisfy you as to the precision of outline of both schools, and the power of expression which may be obtained by flat tints laid within such outline. Next, here are two examples of the gradated shading expressive of the forms within the outline, by two masters of the chiaroscuro school.
The brush is placed firmly on the canvas and then dragged from the point lightly away, leaving a gradated tone. A great deal of the modelling in round objects is to be expressed by this variety of handling. The danger is that its use is apt to lead to a too dexterous manner of painting; a dexterity more concerned with the clever manner in which a thing is painted than with the truth expressed.
This is a typical Watteau composition, founded on a rhythmic play of gradated tones and gradated edges. Flat tones and hard edges are avoided.
It may interest the practical worker to know what are the different stitches used upon this figure. The petals of the top flower are in chain stitch in gradated colouring, the centre is an open crossing of chain surrounded by stamens in stem stitch in varied colour, the outermost leaves are outlined in stem stitch with an open filling of little crossed stitches.
And a great deal of this charm is due to the pretty play from a crescendo to a diminuendo in the tone values on which his compositions are based so far removed from the simple structure of flat masses to which more primitive and austere art owes its power. A typical example of composition founded on gradated tones.
Turner was very fond of these gradated tone compositions, and carried them to a lyrical height to which they had never before attained. His "Ulysses deriding Polyphemus," in the National Gallery of British Art, is a splendid example of his use of this principle.
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