Grasping Color: A Material History of Color Charts

by Kate Burnett Budzyn   

Anyone who has thumbed through a paint deck at a hardware store will know the simultaneously delightful and agonizing experience of selecting a color. Butter yellow, lilac grey, eau de Nil, chocolate: infinite hues and their synesthetic names cascade, offering worlds of possibility and pleasure from the space of their small squares on a card.

The reference tool at the center of this experience—the color chart—accomplishes a complex act of translation in humble form. As anthropologist and color historian Anne Varichon explains in her new book, Color Charts: A History, published earlier this year by Princeton University Press, these objects have existed across the modern era because of a universal need to communicate something that is very hard to communicate. Color is impossible to describe, except in terms of comparison. “Color is a characteristic that evades language as well as memory,” Varichon writes, “and can only be grasped by example” (15).

Varichon’s seven chapters, organized by era, deal frequently with technical challenges of producing not just the substance being represented in color charts—from 1780s Cévennes silk to 1930s car enamel—but also the charts themselves. Across the history of color charts, some products, like varnishes, more easily represented themselves: they could be applied directly as samples. Other substances, like urine and dyes, were subject to fading, and some specimens, like feathers, were difficult to contain within the limited space of a chart. Authors and manufacturers thus constantly experimented with the form, leaving behind a body of historic ephemera that is wild in material range and visually spectacular. The book’s large, gorgeously printed reproductions allow readers to interact with these objects on an intimate level.

Varichon’s history begins in the 15th century, when some of the earliest extant color charts were used for the medical purpose of classifying colors of urine. Called rotae urinarum, these circular charts managed to represent one of the least appealing of substances in an aesthetically pleasing spectrum of tones. In the 17th century, as the Renaissance’s explosion of artistic ideas, tools, and capabilities inspired wealthy amateur artists to pick up watercolor and oil painting, artists’ guides needed a way to communicate the specialized skill of identifying pigments and mixing paints. They began including systematically organized color references.

During the enlightenment, Varichon explains, naturalists sought means of observing, identifying, and describing the color of specimens consistently across disciplines. The Werner-Syme nomenclature finally accomplished this task in 1814. A collaboration between a mineralogist (Abraham Werner) and a botanical artist (Patrick Syme), the printed catalog offered names for 108 colors found in nature, accompanied by small, color-stable squares of paint that could be easily reproduced. Each entry listed animal, plant, and mineral examples of a given color, resulting in terms that could be used descriptively in combination with one another.

Here enters what one might call the poetry of color naming, a linguistic process that has in large part been facilitated by color charts. Bringing tones and shades into visual conversation with one another, charts allow us to imagine the ineffable sensory experience of a single color as being part of a given material world. Something singular becomes relative and thereby communicable; we attach metaphors to hues. Darwin, for example, used the Werner-Syme nomenclature to describe “primrose yellow sea slugs” and a “vermillion red spider” during his trip to the Madeira Islands. Through color, disparate earthly phenomena come into direct relationship. As Varichon writes, “Syme understood that the color chart could evoke wonder. He knew how to turn his nomenclature into something sublime, a landscape of color and an epic in praise of Creation” (38).

Of course, across much of the period of Varichon’s focus, from the 17th century up to the present, white people have invented a panoply of theories and systems by which color relativity could be applied to the control of other beings. Varichon includes a chart of eye colors and skin tones from medical doctor Paul Broca’s 1864 General Instructions for Anthropological Research to Be Done on Living Things. Such systematic attempts to categorize humans by color, Varichon notes briefly, were the building blocks of scientific racism and “paved the way for the Nazi racial classification system” (57). The book largely, however, gives short shrift to the monumental racial implications of the topic of color comparison.

Emphasizing industrial history over social history, Varichon suggests that there was, in fact, another mid-19th-century development that radically changed the trajectory of color charts: the invention of aniline dyes. No longer focused on identifying and stabilizing natural pigments, many industries faced an ever-expanding set of chemical innovations to represent in chart form. Companies constantly improvised new methods of binding, containing, and packaging their vast arrays of color samples. Across the late 19th and 20th centuries, market competition and consumer culture drove proliferating forms of color charts as advertisements; they came to represent the infinitely profitable force of choice. Given a range of color options, anyone buying bathtub enamel, lipstick, or barn paint, could feel like a kid in a candy store.

What is it about an offering of color samples that is so tantalizing? Today, Varichon observes, color charts can still be found throughout visual culture, but they are often used for their aesthetic effect rather than their practical purpose. Having surveyed the scientific, technological, and commercial imports of these rainbowy things across the centuries, Varichon comes to a conclusion that even a casual reader might sense upon opening up this beautiful reference book: “Color charts have long provided fertile ground for the imagination, and in recent decades […] they have increasingly become images themselves. Perhaps this is ultimately their most lasting influence” (10).

Those in need of a jolt of the pure, sensory joy that material culture inquiry can bring will find it in Color Charts: A History’s abundant, spectral offering of these peculiarly satisfying objects.

Kate Burnett Budzyn is a contributing writer for the Decorative Arts Trust Bulletin. She researches historic clothing and textiles and is the book review editor at Winterthur Portfolio.