Stranica 21 [21]
OCR
LIGHI AND WATER INTRODUCTION ATER, whether still or in motion, has so great an attraction for the lover of nature, that the most beautiful landscape seems scarcely complete without it. There are no effects so fascinating as those produced by the reflexions in nature’s living mirror, with their delicacy of form, ever fleeting and changing, and their subtle combinations of colour. But though water owes its chief characteristics to the highly reflective power of its surface, it possesses in its transparency another attribute which distinguishes it still more from the lifeless metallic mirror, and is of the greatest importance where the question of colour is concerned. In the following pages an attempt has been made to show, on the one hand, how the various phenomena of reflexion are produced in accordance with natural laws, and, on the other, to what extent . the colours we see in water are inherent in the water itself, visible in virtue of this property of transparency, or borrowed from the sky and neighbouring objects. The true artist will always be guided by his eye rather than by any rules of science, and will instinctively seize the characteristics of water, still or in movement, and faithfully reproduce them; and some may B
