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Henri Matisse travelled to the hot climate of Algiers to find colour more intense than in grey Paris. Van Gogh on ly had to go to Arles for the same brightening effect on his palette. Artists also look at other artists' work for colour inspiratio n. Delacroix looked to Titian, Degas looked to Delacroix. Why invent the wheel if you can just pick one up?

A room does not usually start with a work of art - quite the reverse. Too often, a room is furnished first and art comes in to fi nish it off. Artists and galleristas can get a bit uppity about art being co-ordinated to a room, but the room and the art have to m ake each other look great.

Galleries don't have the art-decor dilemma. With no furniture and the other necessities of life imposing, white is the easy solut ion. In homes, we don't have that blank slate so wall colour can be a mediator. Galleries also don't have to worry about the emotion al content of the art. In galleries, the art has its own voice. In rooms, it has to bring the appropriate emotional tenor. The wall colour can add to its power or calm its strength. Wall colour harmonizes the room visually and emotionally. It sets up the atmospher e.

And for this, my inspiration is James Abbott McNeil Whistler, the artist who knew how to select that one colour to harmonize all the others and evoke the right mood. However, when Whistler was given the ideal colour job - to choose a colour for the dining room of his most loyal patron, Fredrick Leyland, to suit a painting that prominently hung there - the result was artistic success and dec orating disaster.

Whistler was an Impressionist in style before the French Impressionists. He pared colour and shape down to the poetic minimum, th e essence of the Symbolist style, before most Symbolists did it. He said he wanted his colour to sing to the emotions like music.

As an American in Europe, he introduced Monet to Turner's way of dissolving subject matter into light with loose brush strokes an d brilliant hits of colour. But Whistler's colour choices never left the real world entirely. He didn't change nature's colours so m uch as reduce them, arguing that using them all would create visual cacophony. Finding the one "true note" was, he said, the hardest part of painting.

Much of my colour design is dealing with the same challenge: how to create harmony and atmosphere in the presence of colour chaos . It is a mistake to think that, if there is a lot of colour in a room, the last thing the room needs is more colour. Finding the on e true note will blend and calm the existing colours, helping them sing with one voice.

This seemed counterintuitive to Sandra, a client who told me that when she walked through the front door after being away for any length of time, she felt bombarded by all the colour information in her paintings, carpets and furniture. Her curtains were pink. S he had a wingback chair and ottoman in gorgeous red leather. There were burgundy needlepoint pillows next to red and pink cushions. Of all the colours, red, which is the boldest colour, was the most dominant. So as not to compete, her wall colour was a pale grey.

I began with the logical solution. Might she consider editing out some of her things? She made it clear that she liked them all. There was only one answer: The pale walls had to go. They were too timid to do the job. The most dominant colour, magenta red, was n eeded on the walls to pull all the reds and pinks forward and swallow the chaos.

Whereas Impressionists used their vivid colours to capture light, darkness and smog helped Whistler edit them back. These acted l ike a veil that muted hues and shapes in the landscape and made even the ugliest industrial settings look beautiful. "Poor build ings lose themselves in the dim sky and the tall chimneys become campanile and warehouses are palaces in the night and the whole cit y hangs in the heavens and fairyland is before us." In paintings like Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge (1872-7 7), his colours meld into an almost abstract monochromatic harmony in indigo.

Whistler's painting, La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine, was a portrait of a woman in a kimono that hung in the London dining room of his patron, Leyland. The room had been designed and executed by interior architect Thomas Jeckyll and both Leyland an d Jeckyll considered the project pretty much finished when Whistler was asked to choose the colour for the trim and shutters. Jeckyl l had designed an elaborate Gothic ceiling hung with lantern lights. Most of the walls were covered in intricate shelving in a Japan ese manner housing Leyland's collection of fashionable blue and white Oriental ceramics. What wall was left was hung with antique le ather-embossed panels. The furniture was in place. Leyland went back to Liverpool. Jeckyll went on to other projects. Whistler, in t heir absence, went overboard.

Trim was not enough. As if the room were a canvas, he chose one colour to establish the mood of the room. Soon every surface beca me part of Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room (1877), a work in three dimensions with a Japanese flavour, a peacock t heme and a turquoise and gold palette.

Whistler glazed Jeckyll's new ceiling with a Dutch faux gold leaf. On the walls, up to 13 layers of Prussian-blue paint, gold lea f, gold and platinum pigment created a translucency, not unlike that of peacock feathers themselves. He added the circle pattern of a peacock feather glazed in gold. He covered the floor with a large peacock blue carpet. He covered Jeckyll's new walnut shelving wi th numerous layers of gold glaze.

Nothing would stop him from realizing his composition, even if that meant glazing over the leather hangings that some claim were 16th-century pieces that once belonged to Catherine of Aragon. To finish, he painted large gold and silver peacocks on the walls, do ors and shutters. He thought it so magnificent he held a public viewing.

When Leyland returned and found out what Whistler had done and how much it cost, he went berserk, at first refusing to pay the &# 163;2,000 cost. Whistler stood his ground and lost his most loyal patron.

Just after Whistler's death in 1904, American art collector Charles Lang Freer had The Peacock Room dismantled and saved. It is n ow installed in the Freer Gallery at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., where it took $300,000 (U.S.) to restore.

Excerpted from All About Colour by Janice Lindsay (http://www.janiceli ndsay.com). In stores Tues., Nov. 4. Published by McClelland and Stewart Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.