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Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and scientist. The
writings of Aristotle and the De Coloribus (On Colour) by
his pupil, Theophrastus concluded that all colours must be
created from a mixture of light and dark, for example
crimson would be blackness mixed with firelight or sunlight.
Aristotle organised his 7 colours tonaly.
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384-322
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Aristotle
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Leonardo Da Vinci was an Italian artist and engineer.
Using Aristotle's colour theory Da Vinci developed the
technique of 'chiaroscuro' (light-dark), using light and shade
to depict 3-dimensional objects. Da Vinci identified 5 tonal
values of an object: highlight,direct light,reflected
light,shadow andcast shadow. Da Vinci also identified
arial perspective, noting that objects and scenery appear
more grey/blue as they go into the distance. He described
6 'simple' colours: white, yellow, green, blue, black and red
as artists' basic tools. He also painted the Mona Lisa!
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1452-1519
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Sir Isaac Newton was a British scientist and
mathematician. Newton was the first to challenge the
Aristotelian colour theory, published in 'Opitiks' in 1704.
Newton observed that colour was an attribute of all pure
light. By passing light through a prism, he observed 7
colours: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet -
the colours of the spectrum. Newton arranged these into a
'colour circle'.
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1642-1726
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a prism
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Johann Wolfgang van Goethe was a German poet,
dramatist and scholar. Goethe (pronounced 'Gurta)
produced a controversial colour theory, Farbenlehre
(Colour Learning) in 1810. In this, he attacked Newton and
described in detail complementary colour shadows and
afterimages. The Romantic artist JMW Turner was
inspired by Goethe's colour theory and both the
Impressionist and the Post-Impressionists used his
complementary-colour shadows idea.
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1749-1832
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Cathedral at Roeun
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Philipp Otto Runge was a German artist and theorist who
was the first to publish a comprehensive 3-D colour model
designed to solve artistic problems. His colour theory had
symbolic properites; he regarded the 3 primary colours as
representing the Holy Trinity, Black=evil and White=good.
The artist Paul Klee was inspired by Runge's colour theory.
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1777-1819
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Michel-Eugene Chevreul was a French chemist and a
director of a dyehouse. He published 'The Law of
Simultaneous Colour Contrast' in 1839 - one of the first
systemic studies of colour perception, with a compendium
of colour principles. These principals were widely adopted
by 19th century French painters, from Delacroix to Matisse.
In his role as director of dyes at Gobelins textile factory, he
devoted much of his time to developing more lightfast blue
and violet dyes. Chevreul's 'law' of simultaneous contrast
states that 'two adjacent colours, when seen by the eye, will
appear as dissimilar as possible'. Chevreul also
developed 'optical mixing' - the use of small dots of colour,
which artists such as Seurat developed into the technique
of Pointillism.
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1786-1889
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Seurat
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Ogden Rood was an American physicist and artist. Rood
wrote 'Modern Chromatics' in 1879, where he introduced
the terms hue, purity (saturation) and luminosity (value).
Rood was the first to explain clearly the differences
between additive colour mixing of light, and subtractive
colour mixing of paints. The Neo-Impressionist painters
Georges Seurat and Paul Signac used Rood's colour
theory.
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1831-1902
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Hermann von Helmholtz was a German physicist and
physiologist. Von Helmholtz identified the additive primary
colours as red, green and blue-violet. He published the
‘Handbook of Physiological Optics’ in 1867.
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1867
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Wilhelm Otswald was a Nobel prize-winning German
chemist. His colour system is one of the most influential of
the 20th century. His 3-Dimensional colour sphere has 24
colours around the 'equator', which tint to white at the 'north
pole' and shade to black at the 'south pole'.
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1853-1932
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Albert Munsell was an American artist and teacher. Using
Rood's concepts he developed the Munsell Colour System
in 1905. Munsell identified 5 primary colours: red, yellow,
blue, green and purple. He used the complementary
colours to 'grey' them.
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1858-1918
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Joseph Albers compiled a long series of projects using
coloured paper, for artitsts to learn how to see and
appreciate colour relationships.
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1888-1976
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Colour Theorists
