Thinking in Color

Perspectives from. The Artist's Road

Jacques-Fabien Gautier’s Color Chart 1746

The wonderful Public Domain Review is a non-profit website that curates and showcases compelling works that have fallen out of copyright and into the public domain. The focus is the history of art, literature and ideas.

One of their most interesting articles features color wheels, pyramids and systems created throughout the last four centuries in our ongoing attempts to understand and order color and color relationships.

In 1746 Jacques-Fabien Gautier created the striking image (above) to represent his color theory that the primary colors are black and white. He believed that the colors that we today designate as primary—red, yellow and blue were secondary colors, revealed from the shadows by the addition of light.

Twenty years later, Jacob Christian Schäffer illustrated his personal theories of color in a quaint chart where the principal colors resided in families, each family with its own coat of arms.

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