GTK3 Colors and Styles

[The Devils Jester <thedevilsjester gmail com>]

I am trying to simulate button face and button background colors (as well as a few others) in GTK3.  What I need is a close approximation of these two colors.  This is not very straight forward with GTK3 for obvious reasons.  Yet I still need to achieve this in a reasonable fashion.

The css properties for "color" and "background-color" often return black if a gradient or image is being used instead.

I have a few questions:

1. Is there a way to tell what is actually being used?  A solid color, gradient, or image?

2. In the case of a gradient, is there a simple way to get the start/end colors?

3. Is there a way to just get the whole style sheet (for all widgets at once) and query any widget's properties?

While the "draw background" and similar methods are very useful, they are unfortunately not a viable solution for my problem, I need actual colors.

Thanks!  I appreciate any help figuring this out.