Skip to main content

Behold One of the Earliest Known Color Charts: The Table of Physiological Colors (1686)

The period called the Enlightenment produced a revolution in which one sense, vision, became privileged above all others. As a result, Sachiko Kusukawa writes at The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, “science is supremely visual. Indeed, one might say, excessively so.” Kusukawa situates English naturalist and illustrator Richard Waller at the beginning of her history about how sight came to dominate, and Sarah Lowengard places Waller’s color chart, presented at the Royal Society in 1686, at a formative moment in “the creation of color in Eighteenth-Century Europe.”

That’s not to say, of course, that color didn’t exist before charts like Waller’s, but it didn’t exist in neat taxonomies that divided color discretely, named and categorized it, and mapped the natural world by means of color theory. Waller’s “‘Table of Physiological Colors Both Mixt and Simple’ would permit unambiguous descriptions of the colors of natural bodies. To describe a plant, for example, one could compare it to the chart and use the names found there to identify the colors of the bark, wood, leaves, etc. Similar applications of the information collected in the chart might also extend to the arts and trades, he suggested.”

The naturalist approach to color would inform the artificial creation of color, helping “manufacturers to produce consistent dyes and paints,” notes the Smithsonian Libraries. Waller’s system was not precise enough for the task, but many others, including board game pioneer Milton Bradley, picked up his work and refined it, producing not only scientific and industrial color guides, but also pedagogies like Bradley’s Elementary Color textbook for children. Keith Moore, Head of Library & Information Services at the Royal Society, traces Waller’s color dots through the arts, “from the low art Ben-Day dots in the vintage comic books I used to read as a child to the high art pointillism and divisionism pioneered by Georges Seurat.”

Dozens of color systems, wheels, charts, and tables appeared over the next few hundred years, from the elaborate to the very simple. All of them have encountered the same basic issue, namely the subjectivity of visual perception. “Waller’s visual system exhibits the same conceptual problem… that plagued nearly all eighteenth-century classification systems. Which colors can be included and what is their ‘correct’ order? The answer was always tempered by available coloring materials and choice of media.” As more pigments became available, so too did more colors in the color charts.

Is the making of color classification systems more of a science or an art? It depends, perhaps, on what they’re used for, but “color remains elusive to scientists and color experts,” the Smithsonian points out, over 400 years after Waller’s chart. Since then, however, the language of color has evolved, as he envisioned, into a practical and poetic syntax and vocabulary.

See a larger version of the chart here and read about it in detail in Lowengard’s excellent article.

Related Content: 

Werner’s Nomenclature of Colour, the 19th-Century “Color Dictionary” Used by Charles Darwin (1814)

A Pre-Pantone Guide to Colors: Dutch Book From 1692 Documents Every Color Under the Sun

The Vibrant Color Wheels Designed by Goethe, Newton & Other Theorists of Color (1665-1810)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Behold One of the Earliest Known Color Charts: The Table of Physiological Colors (1686) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooksFree Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/36VMtlo
via Ilumina

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music: An Interactive, Encyclopedic Data Visualization of 120 Years of Electronic Music

In a very short span of time, the descriptor “electronic music” has come to sound as overly broad as “classical.” But where what we (often incorrectly) call classical developed over hundreds of years, electronic music proliferated into hundreds of fractal forms in only decades. A far steeper quality curve may have to do with the ease of its creation, but it’s also a factor of this accelerated evolution. Music made by machines has transformed since its early 20th-century beginnings from obscure avant-garde experiments to massively popular genres of global dance and pop. This proliferation, notes Ishkur—designer of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music —hasn't always been to the good. Take what he calls “trendwhoring,” a phenomenon that spawns dozens of new works and subgenera in short order, though it’s arguable whether many of them should exist. Ishkur, describes this process below in an excerpt from his erudite, sardonic “Frequently Unasked Questions”: If fart noises were sudde...

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

We admire Johannes Vermeer’s  Girl with a Pearl Earring   for many reasons , not least that it looks exactly like a girl with a pearl earring. Or at least it does from a distance, as the master of light himself no doubt stepped back to confirm countless times during the painting process, at any moment of which he would have been more concerned with the brushstrokes constituting only a small part of the image. But even Vermeer himself could have perceived only so much detail of the painting that would become his masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaZYTwmjwU Now, more than 350 years after its completion, we can get a closer view of Girl with a Pearl Earring  than anyone has before through a newly released  10 billion-pixel panorama . At this resolution, writes Petapixel’s Jason Schneider , we can “see the painting down to the level of 4.4-microns per pixel.” Undertaken by Emilien Leonhardt and Vincent Sabatier of 3D microscope maker Hirox Europe ...

Drunk History Takes on the Father of Prohibition: The Ban on Alcohol in the U.S. Started 100 Years Ago This Month

There may be plenty of good reasons to restrict sales and limit promotion of alcohol. You can search the stats on traffic fatalities, liver disease, alcohol-related violence, etc. and you’ll find the term “epidemic” come up more than once. Yet even with all the dangers alcohol poses to public health and safety, its total prohibition has seemed “so hostile to Americans’ contemporary sensibilities of personal freedom,” writes Mark Lawrence Schrad at The New York Times , “that we struggle to comprehend how our ancestors could have possibly supported it.” Prohibition in the United States began 1oo years ago-- on January 17, 1920--and lasted through 1933. How did this happen? Demand, of course, persisted, but public support seemed widespread. Despite stories of thousands rushing bars and liquor stores on the evening of January 16, 1920 before the 18th Amendment banning alcohol nationwide went into effect, “the final triumph of prohibition was met with shrugs…. The United States had...