In 1692, just 50 years after the Taj Mahal was completed, an artist of the name A. Boogert sat down to create another masterpiece. What began as an educational guide for artists become something so much more. He starts out with why it is important to have color in paintings – it was the 1600’s! Naturally, he explains how to create certain hues and various tones by adding one, two or three parts of water. This doesn’t seem like much of a masterpiece initially, but the final product is unfathamoble in it’s resource and scope. This 800 page book is titled Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau. Google Translate would give you “Treaty of colors used to paint water”, but what it actually represents, is the most comprehensive guide to paint and color at that time. A. Boogert, single handedly, painted every single color combination imaginable.
In order for anybody to understand how incredibly resourceful the book was, it had no equivalent until 1963. 271 years after, the contemporary world comes out with the Pantone Color Guide. Anyone who has a wall painted would’ve seen this useful tool before.
Pantone began as a commercial printing company in the 1950s. In 1956, they hired a Hofstra University graduate Lawrence Herbert as a part-time employee. In 1963, Herbert, created an system of identifying, matching and communicating colors to solve the problems associated with producing accurate color matches. His insight that the spectrum is seen and interpreted differently by each individual led to the invention of the Pantone Matching System, a book of standardized color in fan format. In October 2007, X-Rite Inc, a supplier of color measurement instruments and software, purchased Pantone for $180 million. How’s that for documenting colors?
If only A. Boogert found some venture capitalists of his own, Pantone might have never existed! We’d all be using “Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau”, definitely not a mouthful! The entire book is viewable in high resolution here, and you can read a description of it here. The book is currently kept at the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix-en-Provence, France.