Foundations

A Short History of Color Theory

The thinkers and books that set the terms painters still use

Ideas about color come from physicists, poets, chemists and teachers, not only from painters. Each of them asked a different question: what light is, how the eye answers it, how neighboring colors affect each other, and how to name a color exactly. Their books and plates, like the painter Philipp Otto Runge's 1810 color sphere shown here with white and black at its poles, still shape how color is taught.

• Newton's prism experiments and his circle of colors
• Goethe's turn from light to the viewing eye
• Chevreul's discovery at a Paris tapestry works
• Munsell's measured system and the art-school teachers who followed

Plate

A full-page printed picture in a book, often printed separately from the text and sometimes colored by hand.

Works in this part

Image: Getty Research Institute via Internet Archive · Public domain