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English engraver Moses Harris created his Natural System of Colours
around 1776 but it was published more widely in 1811
to The Color Atlas, which Munsell published in 1913,
he wrote that ‘neglect of either scale – that is, failure
to state either the hue, the value, or the chroma of a
colour – creates doubt and confusion.’
Munsell’s division of colour into his hue, value and
chroma system built on the work of Maxwell on tint,
shade and hue, and that of the artist and physicist
Ogden Rood, whose 1879 Modern Chromatics split
it into three constants: purity, luminosity and hue.
As early as 1801 the 19th-century French painter
Gaspard Grégoire had published an atlas containing
some 1300 colour samples arranged by hue, value and
relative chroma but no copies survive. But both he
and Munsell realised that words alone aren’t all that
useful as a means of describing colours. The term
pink, for example, might mean light red or rose or
coral or salmon or any of a host of other hues, and
in any case derives from the description of a ‘pinked’,
frilly garden plant whose flowers can be almost any
colour. At the time of Munsell’s invention of what
the colour theorist Faber Birren called a grammar
of colour, the linguistic study of colour was freighted
with unhelpful colonial and racialist assumptions
that still linger. To add to the confusion, arguments
(that remain to some extent unsettled) raged over the
physical and phenomenological nature of colour.
The Color Atlas led on to the Munsell Book of
Color, which described his colour order system and
included about 1500 samples of painted colours,
arranged over 40 pages. Munsell plotted five primary
hues (purple, blue, green, yellow and red) on to a
