yellow-grays

Updated: May 29, 2025

For myself, I have always held that the most perfect harmonies required in either wall decoration, furniture, dress goods, or any other fabrics that color enters into, have their exact counterpart in some color tones of nature that the russet-browns and yellows of autumn; the contrasting opalescent hues of a morning sky, rose-pink, pale blue, or delicate tea-rose yellow; the gloom of a forest with its yellow-grays and blue-grays, the gray-green moss of the lichens, the brown of the tree-trunks, the black and gray hues of the rocks, all these, if carefully studied and analyzed and reproduced, would make beautiful anything in the world from a bonnet to a château.

Francis Hopkinson Smith - Outdoor Sketching: Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914

One day, looking at a new bare wooden cottage unpainted as yet in contrast to a mass of foliage in the early autumn before the leaves had begun to turn, in which the yellow-grays one often sees predominated, he suddenly thought to himself: "The tree-trunks and underbrush do not stand out; they are all of one piece, each keeping its place, while my house" as he rather inelegantly but forcibly expressed it "sticks up like a sore thumb."

Francis Hopkinson Smith - Outdoor Sketching: Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914