A Scheme of Colour Standards

Abstract

THE confusion which has long prevailed, and does not promise any immediate disappearance, in the use of colour names, is an inevitable consequence of the absence of any definite standards of colour. In music and form we have well-established and very satisfactory terms to describe definite sense perceptions, and it would be difficult to conceive how we could dispense with them; but for colour perceptions we have neither any well-defined concepts for those terms which have become well established, nor any definite and well-arranged system of colour terms for common use. Those terms which have acquired a somewhat definite significance are nevertheless used for a very wide range of variation. Vermilion and ultramarine, terms which have been used by many of our best authorities on colour, for want of anything better, as a basis for comparison and analysis, are nevertheless used for very variable concepts. The difference between a Chinese and a German vermilion in pigments is very noticeable. A Winsor and Newton “chrome yellow” and a German “chrome yellow” differ by more than twenty-five per cent, of yellow. Among several samples of blue pigments a still greater variation is generally found. When this is true of such terms, what shall we expect will be the case with that very much larger group of terms whose meaning has never reached any considerable degree of accuracy, as olive, citrine, russet, &c., or that still more vague but innumerable class of terms in vogue in popular usage, like “crushed strawberry,” “baby blue,” “ashes of roses,” “peacock blue,” “hussar blue,” and a host of others still more vague and transitory?