The Artist's Road Painting the World's Beautiful Places

Simultaneous Contrast

Perspectives from The Artist’s Road

Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople     1840     Eugène Delacroix

  Michel-Eugène Chevreul should be an honored name in the hallowed halls of art and design schools the world over, but I’ll bet that many artists have never heard of him, or if they have, only in passing. This is a big omission of the man who, among his many scientific and medical accomplishments, helped to formalize and systematize the twin pillars of modern color theory—color complements and color constancy in his book, The Laws of Contrast of Colour.

   Chevreul was a talented and famous French chemist, inventor and author, whom King Charles X appointed in 1824 to run the Gobelins tapestry manufactory in Paris. The imagery in colored tapestries is made from alternating warp and weft threads of various colors, which create a kind of pixellated image, similar to modern offset printing dots, which, when viewed from a distance, combine to create a continuous tone of mixed colors in the woven shapes.

   The Gobelins weavers complained to Chevreul that they were experiencing problems with their black dyes, or so they thought. Chevreul the chemist, investigated and found nothing chemically wrong with the dyes. Curious, he investigated further and realized that the problem was due to the phenomena of the contrast of one color to another. The same blacks looked different in different areas of the same weavings.

   He discovered that when two different colors are put side by side, the brain adds to each color the complement of the other. A blue next to a red will look greener, and the red will look oranger. It is a perception problem of the eye and the brain. Chevreul codified his observations into a Law of Simultaneous Contrasts of Color and immediately began using his law to improve the colors and graphic power of the Gobelins tapestries. He went on to write his influential book and to lecture about his discoveries. One lecture caught the attention of the French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, who put Chevreul’s theories to work on his 1840 painting, Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople.

   By the 1850s, Chevreul’s laws and theories were becoming widely adopted by the textile, fashion and home decor trades through English translations in popular women’s magazines in Europe and the United States. By this time the French Impressionists were aware of these new theories as well. We see the evidence in their use of complements and color contrasts in their work. In 1880, Camille Pissarro started experimenting with color complements in his work and in 1884, Paul Signac and Georges Seurat, who knew Chevreul, became active practitioners of optical mixtures in their oil paintings, employing tiny dots of color, like the tapestries and color printers were using, to create their masterpieces. Largely thanks to Chevreul’s scientific experiments and insights, artists now take for granted that colors appear changed based on what color is adjacent to them and in what proportions.