Luminous Color

In his landmark 1800 treatise on landscape painting, Elements of Practical Perspective, Pierre Henri de Valenciennes lamented the difficulty of portraying the sun’s light using oil paint. An artist, he explained, cannot look at the blazing body for longer than a moment, lest they be dazzled, and even if they could, “as there is no color in nature that is luminous by itself, the painter is very limited in the means he uses to copy the light of nature. So we laugh at the vain efforts made by an artist when he wants to imitate the color of the sun.”