Art Lovers' Niche - Dec 11, 2023

Jacob Christoph Le Bion, a Frankfurt printmaker, first noted the three primary colors, red, yellow, and blue. It was, however, Moses Harris who in 1766 took Le Bion’s three primary colors and arranged them in the shape of a wheel. Even today, color theory is usually taught in the form of an aesthetically pleasing color wheel. The 19th century artists had a limited palette of colors, but were masters (no pun intended!) in achieving beautiful realistic natural compositions with perfect mixes of colors. Beside hue (color family of red, orange, yellow, green, and violet), value (the measure of the relative lightness or darkness of a color) and chroma (how intense a color is) colors have other unique characteristics, such as temperature. All their talents in working with colors produced some of the most beautiful paintings that we love today.

All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.

- Marc Chagall

The man who can see all gray, and red, and purples in a peach, will paint the peach rightly round, and rightly altogether. But the man who has only studied its roundness may not see it's purples and grays, and if he does not will never get it to look like a peach; so that great power over colors is always a sign of large general art intellect.

- John Ruskin