History Of Colours

Over more than two thousand years, there has been, and continues to be, a wealth of wonderful work contributing to our understanding of colour.

There has never been a time when colour did not fascinate humanity and it has always been regarded as one of life's greatest mysteries. Every civilisation had (and still has today) its myths and associations with colour, but oddly, none of them has named many colours. In the 1960s anthropologists Berlin and Kay conducted a worldwide study of colour naming. Many languages only contained two colour terms, equivalent to white (light) and black (dark). Of 98 languages studied, the highest number of basic colour terms was to be found in English - where we have eleven: black, white, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, grey and brown. The other millions of colours have 'borrowed' names, based on examples of them, such as avocado, grape, peach, tan, gold, etc.

The great philosopher, Aristotle, in the fourth century BC, considered blue and yellow to be the true primary colours, relating as they do to life's polarities: sun and moon, male and female, stimulus and sedation, expansion and contraction, out and in. Furthermore, he associated colours with the four elements: fire, water, earth and air. Artists universally adopted his principles and applied them for two thousand years, until Newton's discoveries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries replaced them in general colour theory.

Hippocrates, the father of medical practice, was a contemporary of Aristotle (who apparently did not have a very high opinion of him). He used colour extensively in medicine and recognised, for example, that the therapeutic effects of a white violet would be quite different from those of a purple (violet) one. Another medical man, Avicenna in the eleventh century, in what is now Iran, believed that a person's physical colouring would indicate that person's predisposition to various diseases and always took account of the patient's colouring in diagnosis.

In the fifteenth century the famous Swiss doctor, von Hohenheim, known as Paracelsus, travelled extensively and his methods were considered highly controversial - he received more attention at the time than Copernicus. He placed particular importance on the role of colour in healing. Interestingly, he was a contemporary of not just Copernicus, but Martin Luther, Leonardo da Vinci and many other famous figures of the Renaissance - so his life and learning were conducted in an atmosphere of great transition in thought.

The greatest contributions to our understanding of colour came from men whose work combined science and mathematics with art, metaphysics and theology - indeed the sum of human study. However, in the fifteenth century, with the arrival of humanist thinking, and Martin Luther, there was tremendous intellectual upheaval. The Church lost its grip on education and many disciplines 'went their own way' - leading to the virtual separation of art from science. Further study of colour appears to have been placed in the 'Science' camp. Artists were deemed to be born with an instinct for it.

In 1672, the great scientist, Sir Isaac Newton, published his first, controversial paper on colour, and forty years later, his work 'Opticks'. When Newton shone white light through a triangular prism, he found that wavelengths of light refracted at different angles, enabling him to see the separate components - colours. (He was able to shine them back through a prism and achieve white light again, but unable to see any further breakdown if he shone a single colour through a prism.)

One of the history's greatest minds was that of Johannes Wolfgang von Goethe - who completely disagreed with Newton's interpretations of his own findings. Goethe's 'Theory of Colours', (translated into English in 1840 and still in print) disputes that Newton's prism experiments proved that light splits into its component colours. He felt that if Newton was right, then white light should split under all kinds of circumstances but when he himself shone white light on to a screen in a room, he found that the centre of the image remained white and colours appeared only at the edges. This led him back to Aristotle's ideas; blue is the first colour to appear out of darkness (and most visible at night) and yellow is the first colour to appear out of light (and the most visible colour in light conditions). Hence, for example, our perception of the sun, where we are effectively looking at white light, as yellow and the sky, where we are looking into the vast blackness of space, as blue.

For almost three hundred years after Newton, all further work with colour was essentially concerned with appearance and vision - and most of it strictly scientific. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, the medical community had virtually put paid to the age-old practice of colour therapy, dismissing it as 'mumbo-jumbo'.

However, there was one shining example of scientific study leading to great strides in art - the work of Chevreul, the nineteenth century French chemist who, in studying the chemistry of dyeing, developed a colour system that became the heart of pointillism and neo-impressionism. Artists such as Seurat and Signac only ever used Chevreul's fundamental palette of colours.

In the twentieth century, however, interest in colour exploded. The art of colour therapy was re-born and today even the most mainstream doctors use colour as an everyday part of their work.

In the 1920s at the famous Bauhaus school, in Germany, where the teaching staff included such luminaries as Itten, Albers, Kandinsky, Mondrian and Klee, technology and art were completely reunited. Johannes Itten was particularly interested in the connections between colours and emotions, and colours and shapes. He also observed that each of his students seemed to favour the same palette for their work - and furthermore, the favoured palette appeared to be in some way related to that student's own physical colouring. Itten's seminal book 'The Art of Colour' is a 'must read' for anyone interested in colour.

Nevertheless, when Angela Wright began to pursue deeper understanding of the effects of colour, in the mid 1970s, she found that not much progress had been made since the 1920s. There was no shortage of scientific material describing experiments to establish the psychological effects of different colours. However, the findings were often contradictory and no firm theories had emerged, so it was considered totally subjective, and therefore totally unpredictable.

Her first response to this was that none of these experiments appeared to take account of the finer points of colour - nuances of shade, tone and tint. It is not part of a psychologist's remit to study colour, so they would, for example, describe experiments where they had 'used blue and orange, with full spectrum lighting.' She felt that this was relatively meaningless, as there are at least a million blues and just as many oranges. She felt that colour harmony was a major determining factor in the psychological effect. In simple terms, disharmony negates.

She studied the dynamics of colour harmony in California, working with Mrs Lorea Shearing, a member of the Kalmus family, who invented and developed Technicolor. She formed a clear hypothesis, involving the links between patterns of colour and personality types, that approached colour harmony from a different perspective. Going back to Aristotle's idea that blue and yellow were the true primary colours, she classified all colours, first into cool and warm, then subdivided in terms of levels of intensity and the addition of black, white or grey. This produced four tonal families, which Angela Wright then associated with four personality types, defined with considerable reference to Jung's psychology theories, particularly the concept of extraversion (yellow) and introversion (blue). She developed a clear, rational colour system - the Colour Affects System - enabling individual response to specific colour combinations to be predicted with startling accuracy, and colour psychology to be practised with much more precision and understanding.

In the last two years the Colour & Imaging Institute, at Derby University in England, have confirmed that the colours classified within the Colour Affects System do indeed have mathematical relationships not previously identified.

The work continues.