ABSTRACT
There would be little point in artists working so hard to capture the phenomenology of coloured shadows if this had no aesthetic value. What Rumford hit on is how the blue of a coloured shadow is saturated and luminous at the same time, rather like the blue of the sky, and unlike the blue colours people see on surfaces, which are dark when saturated. Put differently, there is an incongruity to coloured shadows, inasmuch as they have a celestial quality even though they lie on terrestrial objects. The sense that shadow colour is changing is nevertheless indicated by some of Monet’s grain stacks, perhaps because his blurry brushstroke is conducive to the impression of movement and hence to the sense that time is flowing. The most fertile aspect of Rumford’s argument, however, is implicit in its somewhat obtuse claim that the colour of shadows is not as ‘hard as the solid as the solid bodies’ casting them.
