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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.
Every civilisation had (and still has today) its myths and associations with colour, but oddly, none of them has named many colours.
Colour has fascinated culture throughout history, every age and every region has produced dyes and pigment depending on the available resources. Colour has been with us for more than 20,000 years. Evidence survives in early cave paintings and the ancient Chinese are considered to have brought its manufacture and use to a state of perfection tens of thousands of years ago.
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.
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Warm Colour Explained
The ancient Egyptians have been recorded to have been using colour for cures and ailments. Indeed, the 'Ancient Egyptians' worship of the sun may also have a place in the modern world since it may be the sun which will fuel all our central heating systems and lighting systems etc. in the years to come as the coal and oil supplies become depleted. We are now also aware of the effect of light deprivation on a large number of people who suffer Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) during the winter months.
They worshipped the sun, knowing that without light there can be no life. They looked at nature and copied it in many aspects of their lives. The floors of their temples were often green - as the grass which then grew alongside their river, the Nile. Blue was a very important colour to the Egyptians too; the colour of the sky. They built temples for healing and used gems (crystals) through which the sunlight shone. They would have different rooms for different colours. We could perhaps relate our present methods of colour/light therapy to this ancient practice.
Colour was widely used by the ancient Egyptians and was considered to have magical and healing properties and around this time, 1500 BC, paint making as an art became quite widely established in Crete and Greece with the Egyptians passing their skills to the Romans. It was between 600 BC-AD 400 that the Greeks and Romans then introduced varnishes. For the Aztec Indians red dye was considered more valuable than gold and both the Indians and Chinese practiced Colour Healing. A 2000 year old, Chinese chronicle, The Nei/ching, records colour diagnoses.
There are lists on papyrus dating back to 1550 BC of colour "cures".
Their deep knowledge and understanding of the healing powers of the colour rays was so nearly lost when, later on in history, the Greeks considered colour only as a science. Hippocrates, amongst others, abandoned the metaphysical side of colour, concentrating only on the scientific aspect. Fortunately, despite this, the knowledge and philosophy of colour was handed down through the ages by a few.
The Chinese also apparently practiced Colour Healing. The Nei/ching, 2000 years old, records colour diagnoses.
• 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 night and day, introvert and extrovert, cool and warm, contraction and expansion. 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. He discovered that by mixing two colours, a third is produced. He did this with a yellow and blue piece of glass, which when brought together produced green. He also discovered that light travels in waves. Plato and Pythagoras also studied light.
A pioneer in the field of colour, Sir Isaac Newton in 1672, published his first, controversial paper on colour, and forty years later, his work 'Opticks'. Newton passed a beam of sunlight through a prism. When the light came out of the prism is was not white but was of seven different colours: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet. The spreading into rays was called dispersion by Newton and he called the different coloured rays the spectrum. He learnt that when the light rays were passed again through a prism the rays turned back into white light. If only one ray was passed through the prism it would come out the same colour as it went in. Newton concluded that white light was made up of seven different coloured rays. Newton's discovery of the spectrum appeared to replace Aristotle's theory, which had formed the basis of all colour work for two thousand years, but in fact it was an extension of it.
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.
During the Middle Ages, Paracelsus reintroduced the knowledge and philosophy of colour using the power of the colour rays for healing along with music and herbs. Unfortunately, the poor man was hounded throughout Europe and ridiculed for his work. Most of his manuscripts were burnt, but now he is thought of, by many, to be one of the greatest doctors and healers of his time. A man, it would seem, very much ahead of his time. Not only do we now use Colour Therapy once again, but, his other ideas, using herbs and music in healing, can also be seen reflected in many of the complementary therapies now quite commonplace.
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.
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.
It is also interesting to look at the different phases in history and how those phases have been reflected in the colours generally worn at those times.
During times of severity and propriety the code of dress was very much dominated by black and grey. The Victorians mainly wore black - influenced by the Queen's long period of mourning no doubt - and were, in many ways, quite austere and, it has to be said, in many ways not very colourful. The Puritans too, of course, dressed in black.
This is not to say that black is a bad colour. Every colour has its positive and negative aspects. Wearing black with another colour can enhance that other colour's energy. Black can also give the space sometimes needed for reflection and inner searching. It can indicate inner strength and the possibility for change.
Before the last war it was noted that a lot of red was being worn. Red in its most positive is the colour for courage, strength and pioneering spirit, all of which were much needed by the men and women who were fighting that war. However, in the most negative aspect, it is the colour of anger, violence and brutality. As the war was coming to an end, pale blue became a popular colour - an omen of the peace to come perhaps, also giving everyone the healing they must have so badly needed.
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Colours in History
We are now using colour in very positive ways again. Businesses are accepting that their employees may work better given a certain environment and hospitals and prisons are also becoming aware of the effect that the colour around them can have on patients and prisoners respectively. Paint companies have introduced new colour cards with the therapeutic aspects of colour in mind. Cosmetic companies too have 'colour therapy' ranges included in their products. Colour has a great deal to offer us and can be found all around us in nature.
We need to expand our awareness of colour so that we can truly benefit from nature's gifts so that 'colour' becomes a way of life, not just a therapy.
Prior to that the earliest cave paintings were made by using iron oxides, it was the ancient Egyptians who developed other paints from pigments in the soil (yellow, orange, and red). It was the Romans who gave us purple, a pound of royal purple dye, required the crushing of four million mollusks. Cochineal red, discovered by the Aztecs, was made using the female cochineal beetle. A pound of water-soluble extract required about a million insects and it was the Spaniards who introduced the crimson colour to Europe in the 1500's. Later genuine Indian Yellow was produced from concentrated cows urine which was mixed with mud and transported to London for purifying, Sap Green from the Blackthorn berry and Sepia Brown from the dried ink sac of squid.
Paint is made up of a pigment, a binder to hold it together and appropriate thinners to make it easy to apply. 5000 years ago Blue Frit was the first synthetic pigment being produced by the Egyptians from ground down blue glass. Before the nineteenth century the word 'paint' was only applied to oil-bound types; those bound with glue were called 'distemper'.
By 1000 B.C. development of paints and varnishes based on the gum of the acacia tree (better known today as gum arabic) had been developed. At this time umbers, ocher's and blacks were readily obtainable, new colours were also discovered - the first was 'Egyptian Blue'; 'Naples Yellow' dates from around 500 BC and 'red lead' was discovered by accident in about 2500. White lead occurred naturally but demand encouraged production of manmade versions. Vitruvius describes production of white lead in the 2nd century AD.
Before the 16th century, pigment colour was largely dependant on dyestuffs which could be grown in, or were indigenous to Europe and similar temperate regions. Between 1550 and 1850 only the so-called natural dyestuffs were available but the range was greatly extended with tropical dyestuffs from Central America and India and elsewhere.
In the 17th century the Dutch greatly increased availability of white lead and lowered cost by invention of the Stack Process. All white lead paints included chalk in their undercoats, reserving purer white lead for finish coats. In1856 the first real synthetic dye, 'Mauveine', was discovered by Henry Perkins. It was then realized that a great many dyes could be made synthetically and cheaply. It was then that Linseed Oil began being mass produced. They also had pigment grade zinc oxide - we call it white paint.
Using cast-iron paint mills and zinc-based pigments, industrialists produced the first washable paint
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