900-Page Pre-Pantone Guide to Color from 1692 (With Complete High-Res Scan)

> [Patrick Baty, Peter Davidson, Elaine Charwat, Giulia Simonini, André Karliczek -- Nature's Palette (2021) // A colour reference system from the natural world (The first-ever visual expansion of Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, featuring over 800 illustration references from the natural world)]

https://www.thamesandhudson.com/products/natures-palette

> [Julia Voss, Rainer Willmann -- The Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel. 45th Ed. (2020) (Explore Ernst Haeckel, the 19th-century artist-biologist who found beauty in the most unlikely creatures. This collection features 300 prints from his most important publications, including the majestic Kunstformen der Natur and his catalogues of marine life. These exquisite images are a scientific, artistic and environmental masterwork)]

https://www.taschen.com/en/books/classics/43949/the-art-and-...

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Giving commercial links to monopolists, parent poster, is hardly a good idea.

Shoutout also to Goethe's, the only truly systematic, thorough exploration of color that I know of. I have to read the one's you mention, though!

i was at the manchester art gallery last weekend and they had a bunch of lovely t&h (and other) books on colour in the gift shop

The Wikipedia entry's section in the long s's decline is interesting. Once it started falling out of use, it fell hard and fast. I guess everyone was fed up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s#Decline

You are not alone.

I've never read about a cohesive color theory from those early printing (well, early, two centuries in) days so I guess it would likely require a setup of a lot of colors and shades might be more difficult. But I'm not limited by any actual knowledge here and just spitballing.

Then again, it might be worth the effort and time to print several of them but cost a pretty penny.

Perhaps the printing workshop or guild that produced the book thought it would give them a competitive advantage. What's the incentive to mass produce the book, then?

As far as I know, printed maps at that time were coloured in by hand, so no, it wouldn't.

I do think the book was meant to be read by a somewhat wider audience. This could have been his ambitious life's work, but no printer wanted (or knew how to) reproduce it? The dutch in the book is quite readable even today; this is from the introduction text, written as a poem (only rhymes in dutch):

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To the art-loving pupil

This book was written for pleasure and instruction,

for anyone who doesn’t yet know how to colour from life,

whether prints or drawings, whatever their spirit moves them to,

and who lacks nothing but proper teaching.

Come, just read this book with me; it will spark your enthusiasm,

for in it I will show you, through image and text,

what you must do to give everything, true to life,

its proper colour and character, thoroughly and correctly.

That is why this book is filled with colours,

and beside them you will find how each one is prepared.

I expect it was "done" mainly to document the author's interest in pigment exploration and "used" by his students.

Want to learn some state of the art watercolor technique in the late 1600's? Go study under A. Boogert for a few years. Especially valuable because he has created a this massive reference of colors, A solid foundation for an esoteric subject.

I bet every student of his left with their personally created abridged copy containing the most useful colors. to be passed on to their students.

The article implies there are formulations included, mix up a new batch and compare? I know nothing about watercolor pigments, but the saturation remaining after so many years impressed me.

On the subject of mixing up a new batch, it is an easy thing to say, but often following old recipes can be tricky. What was once common and implied is no longer so. The missing context makes reproduction near impossible.

Update: I was looking at the full scan, and while I still can't read dutch, the picture in the article was cherry picked as a good example, many in the full document are very faded.

> the Pantone company, launched in 1963.

I had a dyslexic moment, and read this as 1693 (!), and then gleefully went to Wikipedia with the the intent to enter a delightful rabbit hole :)

I mean... Google!

Well, old paintings from that period are usually fine too, right? Pigments were usually made from mineral sources that last very well. It's usually the varnish on top that changes color over time.

A book's illustrations don't have that problem, and the pages aren't exposed to the air or sun as much either, if kept on a shelf in a dry place most of the time.

Does make me wonder how expensive the blue pages were to make though:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarine

Apple products are pretty well calibrated from the factory. Windows stuff is a crapshoot.

You also have to hope they used a reflective color target to profile the scanner/camera so that the scans themselves are calibrated correctly.

It's early modern Dutch. Old Dutch is much harder to understand.

Also, more like "Clearly Lighting Mirror of the Art of Painting". Although "Paints" is also a proper translation, less common but indeed probably more appropriate for this publication.

It's a standard way to ensure that different printers print the same colour for branding purposes (unless of course, one is large enough to formulate and dictate one's own colour à la Coca-Cola and their red).

c.f.,

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1928117.Four_Colors_One_...

(or some similar text on 4-color process)

And of course, we all owe a great debt to Willis Carrier whose efforts to regularize temperature and humidity for the sake of consistent and accurate printing colour reproduction resulted in the invention of air conditioning.