History of the Munsell Color System and Its Scientific Application
Dorothy Nickerson
Agricultural Marketing Service, United States Department of Agriculture, Washington, D. C.
ALBERT H. Munsell was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 6, 1858 (1). Following a public school education, he studied art at the Massachusetts Normal Art School, and won a fellowship for foreign study. In Paris he attended Julien Academy where his work qualified him to take the examination for the Beaux Arts. There he won second prize in his first yearly competition, and, later, the Catherine de Medici scholarship which gave him another year abroad, this time in Rome. After his return, and until 1917, he kept a studio in the Back Bay section of Boston and there he painted, chiefly portraits. For his exhibitions in Boston, New York, Pittsburgh, and Chicago he was highly praised. His painting the "Ascension of Elijah," so far as we know, still hangs in the Beaux Arts in Paris. During his entire life, boats and the open sea held an unusual interest for him, as is witnessed by his many seascapes.
From 1881 to 1918 he taught drawing and painting from the antique figure and living model, composition, and artistic anatomy (1) at the Massachusetts Normal Art School, now the Massachusetts School of Art. He was loved and respected by his students to an unusual degree— they never fail to speak of him with admiration and affection.
Except for a few publications, chiefly A Color Notation (2) and the Atlas of the Munsell Color System (3), it is to a color diary (4) kept by Mr. Munsell from 1900 to 1918 that we owe most of our knowledge of the development of the Munsell system during its early history.[1]
It is important to recognize that Mr. Munsell's purpose in developing a system of color notation, illustrated by charts of measured colors, was to make the recording of color easy and convenient in order to provide a real aid in teaching color, particularly in teaching color to children. Because he believed that proper color training should begin with children, he spent much time in writing outlines for primary school grades and in conferences with art teachers and supervisors. It is evident that he felt that if children were properly taught, color would have more meaning and use for them all through life, and this became more important than ever to him when the early phases of development of his system were completed. The preface to the first edition of A Color Notation indicates that "'the gist of these pages has been given in the form of lectures to students of the Normal Art School, the Art Teachers' Association, and the Twentieth Century Club .. and... before the Society of Arts of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology." In the preface to the third edition in 1913, he adds: "Brewster's mistaken theory of color . . . still . . . gives children a false start with Froebel balls and a three-color box . . . but a fine color sense may be trained by decorative studies whose simple color relations permit the student to realize in what way and by how much he falls short of a definite standard. Plates II and III reproduce children's studies with measured intervals of color-light and color-strength, which so discipline their feeling for color balance that they may then be trusted to use even the strongest pigments with discretion." An introduction to the system, prepared as an aid in teaching children, was separately published as Color Balance, Illustrated. There is record also of several other articles written by Mr. Munsell (5).
In his introduction to A Color Notation, Professor H. E. Clifford, then Gordon McKay Professor of Electrical Engineering at Harvard University, states, “In the determination of his (Munsell's) relationships he has made use of distinctly scientific methods.” In the same paragraph he acknowledges the chief purpose for which the system was built by stating that we
575
- ↑ A typewritten copy from the diary in Mr. Munsell's handwriting was made in the early 1920's by the Munsell Color Company. For the most part, charts and graphs were traced so as to represent the originals accurately. In 1939,the Inter-Society Color Council obtained permission of the Munsell Color Company, Mr. A. E. O. Munsell, and Mrs. J. E. O. Munsell (son and wife of A. H. Munsell) to have a bibliofilm record made and deposited with the American Documentation Institute of the typed copy of this diary so that it might be made available to research students. The original diary is contained in six volumes. The typed copy is contained in two volumes of approximately 250 pages each.;
