A COLOR NOTATION

AUTHOR’S PREFACE.

At various times during the past ten years, the gist of these pages has been given in the form of lectures to students of the Normal Art School, the Art Teachers’ Association, and the Twentieth Century Club. In October of last year it was presented before the Society of Arts of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at the suggestion of Professor Charles R. Cross.

Grateful acknowledgment is due to many whose helpful criticism has aided in its development, notably Mr. Benjamin Ives Gilman, Secretary of the Museum of Fine Arts, Professor Harry E. Clifford, of the Institute, and Mr. Myron T. Pritchard, master of the Everett School, Boston.

A. H. M.

Chestnut Hill, Mass., 1905.

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION.

The new illustrations in this edition are facsimiles of children’s studies with measured color, made under ordinary school-room conditions. Notes and appendices are introduced to meet the questions most frequently asked, stress being laid on the unbalanced nature of colors usually given to beginners, and the mischief done by teaching that red, yellow, and blue are primary hues.

The need of a scientific basis for color values is also emphasized, believing this to be essential in the discipline of the color sense.

A. H. M.

Chestnut Hill, Mass., 1907.

INTRODUCTION.

The lack of definiteness which is at present so general in color nomenclature, is due in large measure to the failure to appreciate the fundamental characteristics on which color differences depend. For the physicist, the expression of the wave length of any particular light is in most cases sufficient, but in the great majority of instances where colors are referred to, something more than this and something easier of realization is essential.

The attempt to express color relations by using merely two dimensions, or two definite characteristics, can never lead to a successful system. For this reason alone the system proposed by Mr. Munsell, with its three dimensions of hue, value, and chroma, is a decided step in advance over any previous proposition. By means of these three dimensions it is