Isaac Newton. Philipp Otto Runge. Pablo Picasso. Vincent Van Gogh. Claude Monet. These people, as well as others, through their experiences and experimentation, helped develop our modern understanding of colour and our perception of ‘colour vision’.
Isaac Newton discovered that we see colour when the light reaches our eyes as opposed to previous theories of the time in which people believed that the human eye would send out ‘beams’ and when the beams bounced off and returned to the eyes, they would be interpreted and the image would be seen. Newton also discovered that every colour visible to our eyes are contained in white light by refracting the light in a glass prism. You all know of this experiment I am sure but at the time this was big news. Newton kept to the scientific side of things and did not explore how colours would look different when placed beside other colours, which invited artists such as Philipp Otto Runge, Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, and Claude Monet to explore what newton did not, and move this into their paintings. Impressionism is born.
As you can see in this painting (below) by Claude Monet the many colours in this painting look different when put beside other colours in this painting.
Figure 1
The painter leaves it to the beholders eyes to fill in the blanks and get the impression of what is going on in the painting.
References:
Gage, J. (1993). Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (pp.191-212). New York: Thames and Hudson.
Figure 1. Monet, C. (c. 1880). Sunset at Lavacourt [Painting]. Retrieved from http://gallery.sjsu.edu/paris/breaking_away/landscape_files/image001.jpg.
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