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Boutet's 7-color and 12-color color circles from 1708
The diagram from Sir Isaac Newton’s crucial experiment, 1666-72. A ray
of light is divided into its constituent colors by the first prism
(left), and the resulting bundle of colored rays is reconstituted into
white light by the second.
Color circles have been used to describe associations of colors from
medieval times, but the first known example of the representation of hue
in the form of a wheel, or circle, commonly suggested as the original
color wheel, is traced to Sir Isaac Newton; whose keen mind was for some
time focused on the nature of light and color.
Aron Sigfrid Forsius was a Finnish astronomer, priest and NeoPlatonist.
In a previously undiscovered text, he set out a system of color that
included his diagrams.
One diagram presents a colour sphere that arranges colors by opposing
pairs: red and blue, yellow and green, and white and black. His diagrams
date from 1611 but lay undiscovered in the Royal Library in Stockholm
until until the 20th century; they were unearthed and presented before
the first congress of the International Color Association in 1969.
Richard Waller
Noting the lack of a standard for colors in natural philosophy, and
inspired by a similar table published in Stockholm, Richard Waller
indicated that his "Table of Physiological Colors Both Mixt and Simple,"
(created in 1686) 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.
Munsell’s color sphere, 1900.
Albert H. Munsell's color system represented as a three-dimensional solid showing all three color making attributes: lightness, saturation and hue.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Goethe's color wheel from his 1810 Theory of Colours
Goethe’s observations with a prism showed him that light did not
split into seven continuous rainbow hues but that the beam had a red
edge, turning to yellow, which became white in the middle until it
passed into green shades that darkened to blue along its other edge. He
did two experiments to prove his theory that color resulted from the
interplay of light and darkness - a light beam in a dark room and a dark
beam (shadow) in a room filled with light. He
observed that when the beam was white and the room was dark, the top
edge of the beam was red shaded to yellow (red along the edge, moving
to yellow inside the white beam) and the bottom edge was violet shaded
to blue (violet at the edge, moving to blue inside the beam). Where the
beam was narrow enough to allow the red-yellow and violet-blue edges to
overlap, he observed green in the overlap. Where the beam was shadow and
the room was light (dark spectrum), he observed that blue shaded to
violet at the top edge of the beam, and yellow shaded to red along the
bottom edge. Where they overlapped, magenta was the result. In both
cases, he found that the yellow and blue remain close to the sides which
are light and the red and violet remain close to the edges that are
dark.
The Natural System of Colors by English entomologist and
engraver Moses Harris, attempted to understand the relationship between
colors and how they might be coded. In his book, Harris wanted to
demonstrate that a multitude of colors could be created from three
basic ones, red, yellow and blue. He was building on the work of Jakob
Christof Le Blon, a German-born painter and engraver, who was the first
to use metal plates (one for each individual color) in the making of
prints with continuous gradations of color. Le Blon’s three main, or
primary, colors were red, blue and yellow, with black used for
outlining shapes. His color theory formed the basis for modern color
printing, however he did not use a fully organized color system. Harris
built on Le Blon’s work to create his first printed color circle in
1766. He
made a distinction between his primary – “prismatic or primitive” (by
which he meant unmixed red [cinnabar], yellow [King's yellow, an
artificial orpiment] and blue [ultramarine] pigments) - colors and
compound colors, creating color circles for both (primary to the
right, compound to the left). Harris mixes his colors so that one of
the two color is predominant, giving rise to distinct colors like
orange-red and red-orange. He further divided wheel into 20 saturation
levels for each color, rendering a wheel with 360 colors on it. Green,
orange and violet are the main colours on the compound circle, mixing
to form tertiary colors of olive, brown and slate. Through his mixing
formula, he presents 15 additional shades and again divides the wheel
into 20 levels of saturation. In total, his wheels showed 660 colors.
However, Harris’ most important contribution was to visually demonstrate
subtractive color by showing that black is formed when
His classification theory was widely accepted by artists by the mid 19th Century.
In the early 20th Century, the German painter, teacher and art
theoretician Johannes Itten, expanded Harris’ theories and that of
Phillip Otto Runge.
Runge had attempted a three-dimensional model of color using a sphere.
The pure hues were the equator; the central axis was a grey scale from black at the bottom to white at the top.
The colors were graded from black to the pure hue to white in seven
steps. Theoretically, the intermediate mixtures were inside the sphere.
Michel Eugène Chevreul was a trained chemist who became involved with
the process of dyeing when he was appointed as the director of carpet
manufacturer, Gobelin. He noted that the colours of the dyes often did
not have the effect desired and that this was due to optics and not
chemistry. In 1839 he produced his seminal work, De la loi du contrast simultané des couleurs,
to provide provide a systematic way to see colours, where he dealt
with the “simultaneous contrast” of colours. His work underlined the
active role the brain has in the perception of colour. He showed that a
colour will give the colour next to it a complementary tint, so that
yellow next to green will receive a violet tint. This is where he stated
that:
Two adjacent colors, when seen by the eye, will appear as dissimilar as possible.
Chevreul developed a
72-segment colour wheel
where there are 12 main colours in each segment, further dividing into 6
zones. Each colour is divided into 20 sections to indicate the levels
of brightness. He designed a 3-dimensional colour circle (right) that
showed the 20 levels of brightness on the flat plane – in the drawing
you can see the orange moving toward white. However, rising from the
center is a line representing black and it forms an axis with the colour
that is broken into 10 segments showing the colour becoming darker. The
numbering system indicates that 0N (N for “nero” or black) is the pure
colour and it moves toward black in increasing increments of “N” until
9N is almost black (9 parts black with 1 part colour) and 10N would be
black.
Otto Runge
The painter Philipp Otto Runge was the next German to corner the market
on color wheels and their related manifestations. His 1807 model took
Mayer’s notion of three “pure” colors, plus black-and-white, and spread
these ideas over and inside a 3-D color sphere (complete with
cross-sectioning).
Modern 12-step color wheel developed by
Johannes Itten (11 November 1888 – 25 March 1967), a
Swiss expressionist painter, designer, teacher, writer and theorist associated with the
Bauhaus (
Staatliche Bauhaus) school. Together with German-American painter
Lyonel Feininger and German sculptor
Gerhard Marcks, under the direction of German architect
Walter Gropius, Itten was part of the core of the
Weimar Bauhaus.
