ABSTRACT
The theory that coloured shadows in a natural scene are produced by contrast first appeared in the mid-eighteenth century, probably in a footnote which Charles-Nicolas Cochin supplied to Jombert’s Méthode pour apprendre le dessein of 1755. There is an element of ambiguity in this account since it does not specify how the simultaneous form of contrast it describes differs from the successive kind described in the previous paragraph. This recounts how, when a ‘pair of green spectacles are placed before the eyes, and viewed through for about five minutes, and then taken away’, the result is that ‘every scene and object will look of a fiery red, opposite to green’. Valenciennes was not the first to enunciate the argument that contrast enhanced the blue colour of shadows generated initially by reflection. Ideas about contrast may have played a role in Friedrich’s painting, since the artist knew Runge.
