March 26, 2014: The Color Book

Way back in 1692 a dude called A. Boogert completed his book, his only book.
Not because he was a slouch, but because it had almost 800 pages, written by hand with quill pens, and written in Dutch...
although that's less impressive considering he lived in Holland.



I suspect back before refrigeration, the available food including the wild mushrooms, inspired him to write this book describing the hundreds of colors he saw. But more than describe, he wrote how to mix each color/tone, and hand painted a sample into the book... scores of them, maybe hundreds.



That right there is pretty damn impressive.
The shame is there was understandably only one copy, and pre-internet only a handful of people ever got to see it, but that doesn't diminish Boogert's accomplishment.

It wasn't until Pantone published their book 50 years ago, that a common reference was available.

Seen at NAG.
She got it from Erik Kwakkel via Colossal.

Great one xoB! I never heard of this before. The classification of colors is a pretty big deal.

I tried to find an article where someone had counted how many different color/tone plates are painted in the book but failed. It's hard because some pages have one and some have several, and I guess nobody wants to go through the book page by page at e-corpus.

Keep in mind this was information strictly for painters, picture painters. Paint for other things and dye for fabrics, were almost nonexistent. Except for Royalty and their buddies, "Would milady like the shawl in black or brown?"

This is brilliant nice catch B.

The origins of 'Navaho' and 'Sea Mist'? NoOOOOOOooooooo!

color and color theory is fascinating. Jos. Albers wrote a book about the interaction of color, there's a great example on this blog:
http://lisasaeboewise.blogspot.com/2...ackground.html

OK, that took me a minute to figure out what the "examples from Interaction of Color" is about. The two color samples at the bottom match the samples in the squares above. They are different shades but look alike when placed on the different background colors.

That stuff is the basis for a bunch of optical illusions that have made me manipulate them because I couldn't believe what they were telling me.
Here's one...