Color theorists

• Aristotle


  Greek philosopher who attempted to explain the composition of colors and how they were related in De Coloribus, the first known book about color
• De Coloribus


  The first known book about color, written by Aristotle. It outlines the theory that all colors (yellow, red, purple, green and blue) are derived from mixtures of black and white
• Leonardo da Vinci


  Italian painter and sculptor; according to him, black and white were indeed colors. He assigned white, yellow, green, blue, red and black as the simple or primary colors. He concluded that certain responses took place when colors are placed next to each other
• Treatise on Painting

  A book by Leonardo da Vinci, which comprised of his beliefs on color theory
• Simultaneous contrast


  When two different colors come into direct contact, the contrast intensifies the difference between them, changing our perception of these colors
• Sir Isaac Newton


  English physicist who was interested purely in the physics of color rather in the perception. He discovered that as a ray of white light passes and is bent, or refracted, through a prism it is broken into an array of 7 colors
• Moses Harris


  An English entomologist and engraver who wrote The Natural System of Colors in 1766. Presented red, yellow, and blue as the primitives
• Harris wheel


  Divided into 18 equal hue divisions and each division was then graded by value dark to light; similar to pigment wheel but with more tertiary colors
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


  German poet who published Theory of Colors. He was one of the first modern thinkers to investigate and record the function of the eye and its interpretation of color, rather than properties of light. He explored every aspect of colors, its reactions, and the role of complementary colors in creating shadows, simultaneous contrast, successive contrast, and proportional color use
• Philip Otto Runge


  A German painter who wrote The Color Sphere. He arranged twelve hues in a spherical format, thus giving us the first three-dimensional color model. His primaries were the same and the nine remaining hues were interspersed to form a diameter of equator around the center of the sphere
• Michel Eugene Chevreul


  French chemist hired by the famous French tapestry-weaving studio Gobelins to be its dye master. He wrote The Principle of Harmony and Contrast of Colors. He verified that all hues could be obtained from mixtures of the primaries red, yellow and blue. His greatest contribution was his recording of the reactions that colors have when placed side by side or in relationship to each other. He developed a color wheel based on afterimages
• Contrast reversal


  A variation of afterimage in which the "ghost" image is seen as a negative of the original image and as its complementary color. Occurs when an entire design reverses color when the eye looks away to a blank space. In contrast reversal the "ghost" appears as a sort of double negative, with both complementary colors appearing, but in reversed positions
• Afterimaging


  It is an optical reaction that occurs after we stare intensely at a hue and then shift our eyes to a white surface, the second hue is called an afterimage
• Ogden Rood


  American who proposed that colors differed from one another as a result of three variables - purity (saturation), luminosity (value), and hue. His experiments were concerned with the optical mixing that occurs in pointillism
• Pointilism


  A painting technique in which dots of pure hues are placed together on a white ground so that they are mixed by the eye
• Albert Munsell

  The life's work of this American-born color theorist led to his system being adopted by the United States Bureau of Standards as the acceptable language of color. It was later published as Color Notation in 1905
• Johannes Itten


  Swiss teacher and artist probably best known to the color student for his book The Art of Color and its condensed version The Elements of Color. He taught at Bauhaus School and developed his color sphere and star for his Bauhaus preliminary course in 1919
• Josef Albers


  Teacher at the Bauhaus School, he became absorbed with how color reacts and interacts. He often used the triangle as a teaching diagram which had red, yellow and blue at its points. Orange, violet, and green at the midpoints, with red-gray, yellow-gray, and blue-gray in between