It is not difficult, for example, to enjoy the beauty of nature’s coloring when the sun is shining brightly. But, because it is so easy, some painters who are colorists will not care to represent it in their pictures. They will wait for what they call a gray day--when the sun is hidden behind clouds of mist. Or, like Corot, they will prefer the early morning or late evening, when the sky is very pale, and the colors of nature are very subdued. Or, like Whistler, who painted _The White Girl_, a girl in white, standing on a white rug in front of a white wall, they will choose some subject in which the difference between the colors is very slight. In a word they are looking, not for splendid but for subtle harmonies. Those grand Venetian colorists of the Sixteenth Century, Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese, and the great Flemish colorist of the Seventeenth Century, Peter Paul Rubens, for the most part gloried in harmonies of splendour, Velasquez, however, Rubens’s contemporary, whose life was spent in the service of Philip IV of Spain, proved himself to be one of the world’s greatest colorists by the soberness and subtlety of his harmonies. A large part of his work consisted in painting the portraits of the King, the Royal Family, and the chief State officers. The taste of the Court was opposed to bright colored costumes; indeed the prevailing colors were black and gray, with occasional touches of relief, such as blue or pale rose. Yet out of these few colors he made wonderful harmonies. To his sensitive eye a black cloak was not a mass of thick darkness. As the light shone upon the various surfaces at different angles, he discovered all sorts of nuances, as the French say, or