Color swatches seem like a modern invention. Pantone, for instance, is tied up with the emerging post-World War II economy that needed to standardize colors in products and print media around the world. Paint companies, using carefully standardized chemical recipes, were able to sell the same shade of ecru in thousands of stores. In the 1950s, the U.S. government first standardized its own color palette.
“Skimmed Milk White,” or no. 7, “is snow white mixed with a little Berlin blue ash grey.” You can find it in “the white of the human eyeballs,” or in opals. “Wax Yellow,” or no. 64, is “composed of lemon yellow, reddish brown, and a little ash grey.” It can be found in the larvae of large Water Beetles or the greenish parts of a Nonpareil Apple.
Werner’s was first published in 1814, but it’s being reissued by Smithsonian Books in February as a small $15 hardback facsimile. Who created this strange and matter-of-fact guide to color? The book was based on the work of an eponymous Prussian geologist, but its creator was actually a Scotsman, the painter Patrick Syme, who used Werner’s work with color to create a practical guide to identifying its shades in the natural world with help from Scottish naturalist Robert Jameson. “The anatomist will find it much to his advantage, to use in his descriptions some regular and fixed standard of colours; and in Morbid Anatomy, in particular, the importance of such an aid will be immediately perceived,” Syme wrote in the introduction.
Werner’s wasn’t infallible, though. The swatches in the book were destined to fade, after all, and it was up to the user to match them. The way we talk about color today, often as a string of numbers rendered on a display, is much more foolproof. But where it may have failed scientific measures of objectivity, the book gave the world beautiful language with which to talk about something intangible and personal–from describing human skin to gemstones to the underside of a moth’s wings.
You can buy a copy here.