green

Spent a sunny morning catching up with my friend Sarah in her lovely garden. I saw these patches on her wall of the bright colours she had considered painting it. We talked about the names of paint colours and what kind of person had a job making them up. Sarah showed me a beautiful book called "Werner's Nomenclature of Colours".


"In the late eighteenth century, mineralogist Abraham Gottlob Werner devised a standardized color scheme that allowed him to describe even the subtlest of chromatic differences with consistent terminology. His scheme was then adapted by an Edinburgh flower painter, Patrick Syme, who used the actual minerals described by Werner to create the color charts in the book, enhancing them with examples from flora and fauna.


In the pre-photographic age, almost all visual details had to be captured via the written word, and scientific observers could not afford ambiguity in their descriptions. Werner’s handbook became an invaluable resource for naturalists and anthropologists, including Charles Darwin, who used it to identify colors in nature during his seminal voyage on the HMS Beagle. Werner’s terminology lent both precision and lyricism to Darwin’s pioneering writings, enabling his readers to envision a world they would never see."

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, you can see the whole of it here in PDF form