ABSTRACT
Although science inclined some artists to overlook coloured shadows where they were visible, and others to see them where they were not, their paintings and verbal reports indicate that many could still perceive them in their full vividness. It remains the case, however, that the first artists to engage with these fugitive phenomena were hampered by the lack of media in which they could record them quickly. Brown also experienced great difficulty in fixing effects of sunlight and shadow, despite employing a quick-drying ‘copal’ medium to enable him to paint more rapidly. Indeed, Brown explicitly bemoaned the impossibility of capturing coloured shadows in paint in a letter of July 1855, which probably relates to the painting that became The Hayfield. The difficulties presented by the perceptual elusiveness of coloured shadows were not entirely insuperable, however. Among the most important of such techniques and devices were those that cropped, or framed, the motif.
