I love stuff like this. The article mentions Werner’s Nomenclature of Colour which is a marvel. There is a wonderful Thames and Hudson book, Nature’s Palette, which includes Werner’s Nomenclature and expands on it by discussing how the nomenclature was produced, has illustrations of the reference plants and animals Werner used, etc.
It makes for a great gift for an aspiring artist interested in natural themes, I think. Particularly when paired with Taschen’s The Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel which is a similarly mesmerising historical reference:
Tangent: always fun to read these old books that still have a long s and having to remind myself not to misread it as an f all the time. It gets so silly, like the authors have a bad lisp (or "bad lifp", I gueff).
(also funny that our forward slash is a descendant of it, meaning it's a "cousin" to the integral symbol)
I read many old books and the long s slightly annoys me, because it frequently is very difficult to distinguish from an f, when the document was scanned with insufficient resolution or the original document was already degraded by time. Guessing the letter from the context can also be difficult in old books, where some obsolete words may be used or which were spelled differently at that time.
I highly recommend ColorNerd on Youtube for his explanations of various color spaces and color theory. It's primarily aimed at artists, but very informational.
> One wonders if “A. Boogert” would have become a household name had his book been printed and distributed.
Would it have been possible to "print" his book? It is full of color swatches of different paint and water mixtures. Could printing processes have replicated this? How are modern color swatch books mass produced?
I've never read about a cohesive color theory from those early printing (well, early, two centuries in) days so I guess it would likely require a setup of a lot of colors and shades might be more difficult. But I'm not limited by any actual knowledge here and just spitballing.
Then again, it might be worth the effort and time to print several of them but cost a pretty penny.
Perhaps the printing workshop or guild that produced the book thought it would give them a competitive advantage. What's the incentive to mass produce the book, then?
I do think the book was meant to be read by a somewhat wider audience. This could have been his ambitious life's work, but no printer wanted (or knew how to) reproduce it? The dutch in the book is quite readable even today; this is from the introduction text, written as a poem (only rhymes in dutch):
---
To the art-loving pupil
This book was written for pleasure and instruction,
for anyone who doesn’t yet know how to colour from life,
whether prints or drawings, whatever their spirit moves them to,
and who lacks nothing but proper teaching.
Come, just read this book with me; it will spark your enthusiasm,
for in it I will show you, through image and text,
what you must do to give everything, true to life,
its proper colour and character, thoroughly and correctly.
That is why this book is filled with colours,
and beside them you will find how each one is prepared.
Indeed, that takes some time getting used to! I wonder how well an LLM would OCR those types of handwritten pages. Probably way better and faster than what I can do!
I expect it was "done" mainly to document the author's interest in pigment exploration and "used" by his students.
Want to learn some state of the art watercolor technique in the late 1600's? Go study under A. Boogert for a few years. Especially valuable because he has created a this massive reference of colors, A solid foundation for an esoteric subject.
I bet every student of his left with their personally created abridged copy containing the most useful colors. to be passed on to their students.
The article implies there are formulations included, mix up a new batch and compare? I know nothing about watercolor pigments, but the saturation remaining after so many years impressed me.
On the subject of mixing up a new batch, it is an easy thing to say, but often following old recipes can be tricky. What was once common and implied is no longer so. The missing context makes reproduction near impossible.
Update: I was looking at the full scan, and while I still can't read dutch, the picture in the article was cherry picked as a good example, many in the full document are very faded.
Except for egyptian blue, not known at that time
...
"Egyptian blue—the world's oldest known synthetic pigment, created nearly 5,000 years ago and lost to history after the Roman Empire—has been systematically recreated by modern researchers and historians."
I'm impressed that the colours are still so vibrant, based on the photos from the books. Some extra context around restoration of of the book would help.
Well, old paintings from that period are usually fine too, right? Pigments were usually made from mineral sources that last very well. It's usually the varnish on top that changes color over time.
A book's illustrations don't have that problem, and the pages aren't exposed to the air or sun as much either, if kept on a shelf in a dry place most of the time.
Does make me wonder how expensive the blue pages were to make though:
Yes, your intuition was right about that! But even back then they were aware that the mineral ones lasted longer. I imagine a high-quality book about color like this would go for the "big budget" paints that lasted.
The fact that only one copy was made suggests it wasn't really intended as a mass-produced book, but as an individual item, perhaps to show to visitors or clients.
Pros already know all about this, but but cool artifact to have if you're doing any sort of visual/design/UI work is a Pantone color swatch books. I like having the little tear-out chips when I want to match paint colors for a paint job or just to hand out to my kids, who use them like trading cards.
It's early modern Dutch. Old Dutch is much harder to understand.
Also, more like "Clearly Lighting Mirror of the Art of Painting". Although "Paints" is also a proper translation, less common but indeed probably more appropriate for this publication.
It's a standard way to ensure that different printers print the same colour for branding purposes (unless of course, one is large enough to formulate and dictate one's own colour à la Coca-Cola and their red).
And of course, we all owe a great debt to Willis Carrier whose efforts to regularize temperature and humidity for the sake of consistent and accurate printing colour reproduction resulted in the invention of air conditioning.
Usually you tell the printers to print in a specific Pantone colour or using CMYK. The Pantone shade tells them what ink mix to use but it's not what the final printed product will look like as that depends on what you're printing on. Say you've a coffee shop and have your logo printed on a white paper cup and also on a brown Kraft box the same Pantone ink will look very different.
Tring to work back from "I want all my printed items to look like Pantone #12345" to selecting the required inks for different materials is a very hard job.
Another problem is Pantone release a new book each year. You'd like to think that is just to ensure the reference colour charts don't fade etc, but they sometimes change the actual colour mix.
In 2023 Pantone changed how they mixed colours [1] which means some visual differences. We had a customer using 544u and that changed quite dramatically with the new mix, all of their branding looked quite different. We had a long fight with the printers trying to resolve this.
Yeah, problems like that are why I insisted on having a chip book so that I could tear off a chip to present to the client when they signed off, and to affix to the proofs sent to the printer.
It was expensive, but it also ensured that everyone was on the same page (literally).
Aren't pantone colours most of the times a spot colour in branding at least in large volume printing? (fifth and sixth rollers if available) Or are most of the prints done solely on cmyk these days?
I love stuff like this. The article mentions Werner’s Nomenclature of Colour which is a marvel. There is a wonderful Thames and Hudson book, Nature’s Palette, which includes Werner’s Nomenclature and expands on it by discussing how the nomenclature was produced, has illustrations of the reference plants and animals Werner used, etc.
https://amzn.eu/d/0injz69N
It makes for a great gift for an aspiring artist interested in natural themes, I think. Particularly when paired with Taschen’s The Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel which is a similarly mesmerising historical reference:
https://amzn.eu/d/0hZ4IE2i
i was at the manchester art gallery last weekend and they had a bunch of lovely t&h (and other) books on colour in the gift shop
I have no weaknesses except T&H and Taschen books and National Portrait Gallery catalogues.
Shoutout also to Goethe's, the only truly systematic, thorough exploration of color that I know of. I have to read the one's you mention, though!
Tangent: always fun to read these old books that still have a long s and having to remind myself not to misread it as an f all the time. It gets so silly, like the authors have a bad lisp (or "bad lifp", I gueff).
(also funny that our forward slash is a descendant of it, meaning it's a "cousin" to the integral symbol)
You are not alone.
We ſhould ſtart a club.
Upvoted for correctly using U+017F.
I read many old books and the long s slightly annoys me, because it frequently is very difficult to distinguish from an f, when the document was scanned with insufficient resolution or the original document was already degraded by time. Guessing the letter from the context can also be difficult in old books, where some obsolete words may be used or which were spelled differently at that time.
The fact that a lot of the old fonts also used an ſ with a partial crossbar on the left side probably makes it a lot worse, no?
I highly recommend ColorNerd on Youtube for his explanations of various color spaces and color theory. It's primarily aimed at artists, but very informational.
https://www.youtube.com/@ColorNerd1
> One wonders if “A. Boogert” would have become a household name had his book been printed and distributed.
Would it have been possible to "print" his book? It is full of color swatches of different paint and water mixtures. Could printing processes have replicated this? How are modern color swatch books mass produced?
I've never read about a cohesive color theory from those early printing (well, early, two centuries in) days so I guess it would likely require a setup of a lot of colors and shades might be more difficult. But I'm not limited by any actual knowledge here and just spitballing.
Then again, it might be worth the effort and time to print several of them but cost a pretty penny.
As far as I know, printed maps at that time were coloured in by hand, so no, it wouldn't.
Perhaps the printing workshop or guild that produced the book thought it would give them a competitive advantage. What's the incentive to mass produce the book, then?
That's an extraordinary amount of effort for a reference that almost nobody else could access
I do think the book was meant to be read by a somewhat wider audience. This could have been his ambitious life's work, but no printer wanted (or knew how to) reproduce it? The dutch in the book is quite readable even today; this is from the introduction text, written as a poem (only rhymes in dutch):
---
To the art-loving pupil
This book was written for pleasure and instruction,
for anyone who doesn’t yet know how to colour from life,
whether prints or drawings, whatever their spirit moves them to,
and who lacks nothing but proper teaching.
Come, just read this book with me; it will spark your enthusiasm,
for in it I will show you, through image and text,
what you must do to give everything, true to life,
its proper colour and character, thoroughly and correctly.
That is why this book is filled with colours,
and beside them you will find how each one is prepared.
Quite readable, apart from the very old-style handwriting.
Indeed, that takes some time getting used to! I wonder how well an LLM would OCR those types of handwritten pages. Probably way better and faster than what I can do!
you can use textsnap on CPU (i made it). https://github.com/kouhxp/textsnap
I expect it was "done" mainly to document the author's interest in pigment exploration and "used" by his students.
Want to learn some state of the art watercolor technique in the late 1600's? Go study under A. Boogert for a few years. Especially valuable because he has created a this massive reference of colors, A solid foundation for an esoteric subject.
I bet every student of his left with their personally created abridged copy containing the most useful colors. to be passed on to their students.
I swear in the early 2000s there was a company that was carefully scanning old manuscripts like this one. I just can't recall the company name.
I love this sort of work.
I mean... Google!
"Pre-Pantone" is underselling this by quite a bit!
> the Pantone company, launched in 1963.
I had a dyslexic moment, and read this as 1693 (!), and then gleefully went to Wikipedia with the the intent to enter a delightful rabbit hole :)
Is there a way to determine how true to original color they are now?
The article implies there are formulations included, mix up a new batch and compare? I know nothing about watercolor pigments, but the saturation remaining after so many years impressed me.
On the subject of mixing up a new batch, it is an easy thing to say, but often following old recipes can be tricky. What was once common and implied is no longer so. The missing context makes reproduction near impossible.
Update: I was looking at the full scan, and while I still can't read dutch, the picture in the article was cherry picked as a good example, many in the full document are very faded.
Except for egyptian blue, not known at that time ... "Egyptian blue—the world's oldest known synthetic pigment, created nearly 5,000 years ago and lost to history after the Roman Empire—has been systematically recreated by modern researchers and historians."
I'm impressed that the colours are still so vibrant, based on the photos from the books. Some extra context around restoration of of the book would help.
Well, old paintings from that period are usually fine too, right? Pigments were usually made from mineral sources that last very well. It's usually the varnish on top that changes color over time.
A book's illustrations don't have that problem, and the pages aren't exposed to the air or sun as much either, if kept on a shelf in a dry place most of the time.
Does make me wonder how expensive the blue pages were to make though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarine
Were they made from mineral sources? I would have assumed they'd use a variety of things - minerals, plants, animals, etc.
Yes, your intuition was right about that! But even back then they were aware that the mineral ones lasted longer. I imagine a high-quality book about color like this would go for the "big budget" paints that lasted.
The fact that only one copy was made suggests it wasn't really intended as a mass-produced book, but as an individual item, perhaps to show to visitors or clients.
wouldn't I need a calibrated monitor to view this? Or are modern LCD displays good enough?
Apple products are pretty well calibrated from the factory. Windows stuff is a crapshoot.
You also have to hope they used a reflective color target to profile the scanner/camera so that the scans themselves are calibrated correctly.
So interesting, including the website
Beautiful.
> Medieval historian Erik Kwakkel found the book in a French database
Interesting, so this book was scanned, but nobody realized its significance until Kwakkel happened upon it?
Pros already know all about this, but but cool artifact to have if you're doing any sort of visual/design/UI work is a Pantone color swatch books. I like having the little tear-out chips when I want to match paint colors for a paint job or just to hand out to my kids, who use them like trading cards.
You can buy older versions for cheap but here's the expensive brand new set for reference: https://www.pantone.com/na/en-us/products/graphics/solid-chi...
Not a pantone shill I just like color.
fyi, "Klaer Lightende Spiegel der Verfkonst" is old Dutch for "Clear Mirror of the Art of Paints", literally translated.
It's early modern Dutch. Old Dutch is much harder to understand.
Also, more like "Clearly Lighting Mirror of the Art of Painting". Although "Paints" is also a proper translation, less common but indeed probably more appropriate for this publication.
Motorola uses pantone colors but I think the color is the least of their issues: https://m.gsmarena.com/motorola_signature_27_5g-14955.php
It turns out after a second of searching it's not really about that. What it is about I do not know how it helps the phone.
https://www.pantone.com/na/en-us/color-systems/pantone-color...
It's a standard way to ensure that different printers print the same colour for branding purposes (unless of course, one is large enough to formulate and dictate one's own colour à la Coca-Cola and their red).
c.f.,
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1928117.Four_Colors_One_...
(or some similar text on 4-color process)
And of course, we all owe a great debt to Willis Carrier whose efforts to regularize temperature and humidity for the sake of consistent and accurate printing colour reproduction resulted in the invention of air conditioning.
It is, but there are a few caveats.
Usually you tell the printers to print in a specific Pantone colour or using CMYK. The Pantone shade tells them what ink mix to use but it's not what the final printed product will look like as that depends on what you're printing on. Say you've a coffee shop and have your logo printed on a white paper cup and also on a brown Kraft box the same Pantone ink will look very different.
Tring to work back from "I want all my printed items to look like Pantone #12345" to selecting the required inks for different materials is a very hard job.
Another problem is Pantone release a new book each year. You'd like to think that is just to ensure the reference colour charts don't fade etc, but they sometimes change the actual colour mix.
In 2023 Pantone changed how they mixed colours [1] which means some visual differences. We had a customer using 544u and that changed quite dramatically with the new mix, all of their branding looked quite different. We had a long fight with the printers trying to resolve this.
[1] https://www.printweek.com/news/article/pantone-explains-cont... > all Pantone Colors were now mixed from 11 base inks plus a colourless extender, a simplification on the previous 18 base inks.
Yeah, problems like that are why I insisted on having a chip book so that I could tear off a chip to present to the client when they signed off, and to affix to the proofs sent to the printer.
It was expensive, but it also ensured that everyone was on the same page (literally).
Aren't pantone colours most of the times a spot colour in branding at least in large volume printing? (fifth and sixth rollers if available) Or are most of the prints done solely on cmyk these days?
PANTONE spot colours include a sub-set which can be represented using 4-colour process (more-or-less).
Yes, presses with an additional unit for a spot colour are more common these days, but it's still an additional plate charge and costs accordingly.