History of colour

Where did our first understanding of colour come from?

People have been fascinated by colour for more than 2000 years. 

Even cave men mixed colours to create their cave paintings. To this day we are still trying to understand, play with and manipulate colour. It is such as important aspect of our every day lives.

 Lascaux - Cave painting in France

The ancient Egyptians may have even used colour for cures and ailments. They understood that the sun brought them light and in their temples were jewels that refracted the suns rays to create different light effects. They understood the importance of blue, representative of the sky and green which represented their earth and this was seen in the colours within their temples. Their use of colour may have even been the start of the colour philosophy that we use today.

Maat and Isis - Ancient Egyptian artwork on Papyrus paper

 Another important anchient culture to to see the importance of colour are the Chinese. They have been using colour therapy for hundreds of years and it even dates back to the Ancient Egyptians.

The Chinese use colour to diagnose illness by reading the colour of the pulses, a persons complexion and the colours of the human tissues and organs.

 Sir Isac Newton & the Prism Experiment 

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1726) created the foundation of the way we understand colour today. He published a series of experiments in 1672 in which he used a prism to refract white light to produce a rainbow of the component colours -red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. The blending of the colours as they merge, Newton described as hues.

Previous to this discovery it was believed that colour was created by mixing light and darkness.

Newton's color wheel combines colors with musical 

notes and planetary symbols

Mosses Harris and the colour wheel

Moses Harris (1730-1788) was an entomologist (a scientist who studies insects) and an engraver living in England. He wrote several books about the study of British insects in which he has hand coloured engravings. Moses was the creator of the first colour wheel in 1766 thus creating the foundation on which colour theory is built today.

The two colour wheels you see above are engraved and hand coloured plates. One is showing prismatic colours and the other is Compound colours.

Moses was mostly concerned with paint colour unlike Sir Isaac Newton who looked at the different effects on colour from light.

“The 18 colours of his wheel were derived from what he then called the three ‘primitive’ colours: red, yellow and blue. At the center of the wheel, Harris showed that black is formed by the superimposition of these colours.”

Muncell's Colour theory 

There were many different theories about how colour worked over the progressing years, but before Munsell the relationship between hue, value and chroma had still not been understood.

Musell's approach was based on rigorous scientific measurement of human vision.
He wanted to create a way to teach the "rational way to describe colour" He was a teacher at the 

Massachusetts Normal Art School, now Massachusetts College of Art and Design, or Mass Art.

In 1929 The Munsell Book of Colour was published. Even though there have been improvements in this theory over the years it is still very commonly used today to identify colours from things like the colour of beer to defining skin colour in forensic pathology.

References

http://robertlpeters.com/news/the-first-colour-wheel/

http://www.college-optometrists.org/en/college/museyeum/online_exhibitions/observatory/newton.cfm

http://www.colorsystem.com/?page_id=743&lang=en

https://m.facebook.com/Stillmanandbirn/photos/a.161530813901128.55524.160548623999347/443049725749234/?type=1

http://brightonmuseums.org.uk/discover/2013/07/04/rare-copy-of-moses-harriss-natural-system-of-colours-on-display-at-the-royal-pavilion/

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/415457134346949826/

http://www.arkangallery.com/AncientEgyptian/Maat-and-Isis#.VRt6oEbtJXs

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next=/science-nature/cavemen-were-much-better-at-illustrating-animals-than-artists-today-153292919/

http://thepowerofcolor.com/color-in-action/colorful-beginnings/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell_color_system