If you work in design, it’s likely that you’ve heard of Pantone. Their Color of the Year feature has always been popular and their website is a huge help for those trying to find a color palette for their own creations.
This year, for the first time, the Color of the Year was actually two colors – Rose Quartz and Serenity, shown below.
Working in design and not having Pantone would make researching the perfect color pairings much more inconvenient. Nobody knew that more than A. Boogert, an artist who wrote a book about mixing watercolors as an educational tool for other Dutch artists.
The book was completed in 1692, a full 271 years before our modern color bible, the Pantone Color Guide. A few samples of this 800 page book are shown below.
The high resolution scans of this stunning piece of educational work are viewable on e-corpus.org, along with a description of the book translated by Erik Kwakkel.
The only physical copy of the book is currently in France, kept at a library and museum space called the Bibliothèque Méjanes. We can only imagine how much time and dedication went into creating this book and we wish that A. Boogert could know that his work was being seen now, hundreds of years later, by thousands of people all over the world.
