From the point of view of his work and example, Reynolds is to be considered as the instrument of destiny appointed to a great end, while at the same time his own slighting and inadequate criticism of this kind of colour and his humble contrition for having been led astray by it are not, if we remember his date, unintelligible. For, having behind him a national past throughout which form, and the intellectual associations suggested by form, ruled paramount, and in which the only recognised function of colour had been its decorative function, it must seem to be inevitable that, however natural an aptitude he may have possessed for judging the grandeur of form, he could have possessed little for appraising the effects of colour. The truth is that he applies to colour used as the Venetians used it exactly the kind of criticism which he might have applied to it as it was used all through the Gothic epoch. It was inbred in Reynolds that colour must be and could be only a property of form--must and could be, that is to say, only decorative. To this formula he returns again and again, and however inapplicable it may seem to the mighty Venetian canvases, we have only to put ourselves in Reynolds’s time and place to perceive that the use of it was natural and inevitable.
But all this represented, after all, only his conscious criticism and reasoning. Form is intellectual, colour emotional, and if intellectually Sir Joshua remained true to the first, emotionally he abandoned himself entirely to the last. Venice never conquered his reason, but she conquered his instincts and feelings and affections, and, for all that reason could do, for thirty years, from his return from Italy until his death, he poured forth work which owes all its power and charm to that very glow and suffusion of colour which year by year he denounced to the pupils of the Royal Academy as a delusion and a snare. It seems to me that this conquest of Sir Joshua Reynolds, in spite of all his protests and in defiance of all his reasoning, is about the most remarkable proof extant of the irresistible influence which emotional colouring can exert.
Well, then, turning to these Discourses, let us say at once that all the strictures on the great colourists which they contain do not constitute a real valuation of colour at all, but only a valuation of it by one bred in traditions of form. They have, indeed, their own great interest. They enable us to realise, more vividly than anything else I can think of, the limitations and one-sidedness of art in England in the days before Reynolds’s own painting achievements had helped to lay the basis of a truer standard in criticism than any he himself possessed or could possess. Here their interest is unique. But as criticism we may pass them by. No one, indeed, has refuted them more ably than Sir Joshua himself. His real and genuine estimate of colour is to be found, not in what he said, but in what he did.