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A 900-Page Pre-Pantone Guide to Color from 1692
Hraness wrote this summary from a saved copy of the source. Quotations are taken word for word from the source.
gist
Josh Jones revisits A. Boogert's 1692 Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l'eau, a one-copy, 900-page Dutch manual on mixing watercolors with over 700 pages of hand-painted swatches. Built on Aristotle's color system just before Newton's Opticks, it had little influence, but its digitized pages now read like a Pantone book.
ideas
- A single, unprinted masterwork. Boogert made only one copy, so the manual likely reached few painters of the Dutch Golden Age.
- Practical, not theoretical. The handwritten text teaches watercolorists to mix paints and shift tone with measured portions of water.
- On the wrong side of Newton. Its Aristotelian color system was soon displaced by spectrum-based theory, a century before Goethe, Werner, and eventually Pantone.
- Now freely viewable. Medievalist Erik Kwakkel surfaced it, and the Bibliothèque Méjanes hosts zoomable high-resolution scans.
quotes
“Author and artist A. Boogert created one, and only one, copy of his extraordinary manual on color mixing in 1692.”
“because it provides an unusual peek into the workshop of 17th-century painters and illustrators.”
“They resemble page after page of Pantone color chips, except without the household name.”