His idea of color was a peony, with the dew of early morning on its petals. The intense blue of the sea, as he saw it a mile or two away, from the Quincy hills; the cumuli in a June afternoon sky; the strong reds and greens and purples of colored prints and children's picture-books, as the American colors then ran; these were ideals. The opposites or antipathies, were the cold grays of November evenings, and the thick, muddy thaws of Boston winters.
Now this from Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (p. 129-130), in the chapter on the glass of Chartres:
The windows claim, therefore, to be the most splendid colour decoration the world ever saw, since no other material, neither silk nor gold, no opaque colour laid on with a brush, can compare with translucent glass, and even the Ravenna mosaics or Chinese porcelains are darkness beside them.
And quoting Viollet-le-Duc:
...the first condition for an artist in glass is to know how to manage blue. The blue is the light in windows, and light has value only by opposition.
