Colour and its History

Abstract

Colour is treated from widely differing points of view by physicists, chemists, psychologists and artists. These perspectives might be unified in an historical context, but the few histories of colour which have appeared so far still, for the most part, reflect and perpetuate these specialist biases. One single potential unifier might be the study of colour language, but this, too, has generally been the preserve of experimental psychologists, who have hardly been concerned with its historical dimensions. This review proposes that the history of art might offer the best prospect of integrated studies of colour since artefacts exist, and can be examined physically, but are also the product of values, whose study involves language and psychology in a wider sense.