18. The Lustre of the Cloudy Ones

No colours that can be fixed in earth can ever represent to you the lustre of these cloudy ones. But the actual tints may be shown you in a lower key, and to a certain extent their power and relation to each other.

I have painted the diagram here shown you with colours prepared for me lately by Messrs. Newman, which I find brilliant to the height that pigments can be; and the ready kindness of Mr. Wilson Barrett enables me to show you their effect by a white light as pure as that of the day. The diagram is enlarged from my careful sketch of the sunset of 1st October, 1868, at Abbeville, which was a beautiful example of what, in fine weather about to pass into storm, a sunset could then be, in the districts of Kent and Picardy unaffected by smoke. In reality, the ruby and vermilion clouds were, by myriads, more numerous than I have had time to paint: but the general character of their grouping is well enough expressed. All the illumined clouds are high in the air, and nearly motionless; beneath them, electric storm-cloud rises in a threatening cumulus on the right, and drifts in dark flakes across the horizon, casting from its broken masses radiating shadows on the upper clouds. These shadows are traced, in the first place by making the misty blue of the open sky more transparent, and therefore darker; and secondly, by entirely intercepting the sunbeams on the bars of cloud, which, within the shadowed spaces, show dark on the blue instead of light.

But, mind, all that is done by reflected light—and in that light you never get a green ray from the feflecting cloud; there is no such thing in nature as a green lighted cloud relieved from a red sky,—the cloud is always red, and the sky green, and green, observe, by transmitted, not reflected light.