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Updated: June 5, 2025
This was at once varied and of great body not at all like the smooth, glossed colour of most rock, but soft and rich. You've seen painters' palettes it was just like that, pasty and fat. There were reds of all shades, from a veritable scarlet to a red umber; greens, from sea-green to emerald; several kinds of blue, and an indeterminate purple-mauve. The whole effect was splendid and barbaric.
Immediately after breakfast every morning, Gwynne Ellis, armed with brushes, palettes, and divers other encumbrances, would ramble away over shore or cliff, bringing with him in the evening the most beautiful scenes and views of the neighbourhood, which his deft brush had transferred to the pages of his portfolio.
An easel with a canvas on it stood convenient to the light; a flesh-tinted lay-figure in tumbled drapery drooped limply in a corner; a table littered with palettes and brushes and battered tubes of color was carelessly pushed against the window; there were some lustrous rugs hung up beside the door; the floor was bare except for a great tiger-skin, with the head on, that sprawled in front of the fire-place.
They do hold palettes full of the strongest, richest colors, and dare lay them, in vivid flecks, on their canvas. They do not care if they may offend some modern cultivated eyes, used only to the invisible blues and shadowy greens and that host of cold, lifeless, toneless grays, of refined conventional art.
The antique influence was not, indeed, equally strong throughout Italy; it was strongest in the Tuscan school, which, seeking for perfection of linear form, found that perfection in the antique; it was weakest in the Lombard and Venetian schools, which sought for what the antique could not give, light and shade and colour; the antique was most efficacious where it was most indispensable, and it was more necessary to a Tuscan, strong only with his charcoal or pencil, than to Leonardo da Vinci, who could make an imperfect figure, beckoning mysteriously from out of the gloom, more fascinating than the finest drawn Florentine Madonna, and could surround an insignificant childish head with the wondrous sheen and ripple of hair, as with an aureole of poetry; it was also less necessary to Giorgione and Titian, who could hide coarse limbs beneath their draperies of precious ruby, and transfigure, by the liquid gold of their palettes, a peasant woman into a goddess.
It was a small room like to that of any scribe, for on the tables were palettes, pens of reed, ink in alabaster vases, and sheets of papyrus pinned upon boards. Against the walls hung racks in which were papyrus rolls, and on the hearth burned a fire of cedar-wood. By this fire stood the Prince, whom I knew from his statues.
The men, now that Oliver had arrived, drew up around the long table. Some began setting their palettes; others picked out, from the common stock before them, the panels, canvases, china plates, or sheets of paper, which, under their deft touches, were so soon to be covered with dainty bits of color. It was in many ways a remarkable club.
The window which gave the light to this room was square, and not much larger than one half the size of a common window in a private house, whilst the lower part of this window was nine feet four inches from the floor. The chair for his sitters was raised eighteen inches from the floor, and turned round on castors. His palettes were those which are held by a handle, not those held on the thumb.
Jack Bedford, meanwhile, had busied himself rolling another table a long one under the circle of gas-jets so that the men could see to work the better, and loading it with palettes, china tiles, canvases, etc., to be used by the members of the club in their work of the evening.
Close by it were found some of the most valuable relics of the earliest Pharaonic age, the great ceremonial mace-heads and vases of Narmer and "the Scorpion," the shields or "palettes" of the same Narmer, the vases and stelas of Khâsekhemui, and, of later date, the splendid copper colossal group of King Pepi I and his son, which is now at Cairo.
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