Colour System history 101
I think we have all heard of the colour wheel – the organisation of colour hues in a circle that show their relationships with consideration to the primary (red yellow blue) and secondary (purple, orange and green) colours – but what of its origins – it would appear that most big thinkers of the past have put their minds to it and have created their own theories, and some of them are presented below, courtesy of the Colour Museum.
Don’t expect me to go into depth about colour – whoa! – too big for me, but if you are interested, a great place to start is at Color Systems and Systematization which goes into great depths and has some great colour examples from the past
- Pythagoras ~550BC
- Aristotle ~350BC
- Aron Sigfrid Forsius 1611
- Athanasius Kircher 1646
- Sir Isaac Newton 1704
- Ignaz Schiffermüller 1772
- Tobias Mayer 1775
- Michel Eugène Chevreul 1839
- Philipp Otto Runge 1810
- Albert Henry Munsell 1915
- Michel Albert-Vanel 1983
- Modern colour wheel
These images are from The Colour Museum