The feeling for color as such comes distinctly later. The first delight in colored objects is hardly distinguishable from the primordial delight in brightness. This applies pretty manifestly to the brightly illumined, rose-red curtain which Preyer's boy greeted with signs of satisfaction at the age of twenty-three days, and it applies to later manifestations. Thus Preyer found, on experimenting with his boy toward the end of the second year as to his color discrimination, that a decided preference was shown for the bright or luminous colors, red and yellow.[1] Much the same thing was observed by Miss Shinn in her interesting account of the early development of her niece's color sense.[2] Thus in the twenty-eighth month she showed a special fondness for the daffodils, the bright tints of which allured another and older maiden, and, alas! to the place whence all brightness was banished. About the same time the child conceived a fondness for a yellow gown of her aunt, strongly objecting to the substitution for it of a brown dress. Among the other colored objects which captivated the eye of this little girl were a patch of white cherry blossom and a red sunset sky. Such observations might easily be multiplied. Whiteness, it is to be noted, comes, as we might expect, with bright partial colors, among the first favorites.Cf. Perez, L'Art et la Poésie chez l'Enfant, p. 41 ff.
At what age a child begins to appreciate the value of color as color, to like blue or red, for its own sake and apart from its brightness, it is hard to say. The experiments of Preyer, Binet, Baldwin, and others, as to the discrimination of color, are hardly conclusive as to special likings, though Baldwin's plan of getting the child to reach out for colors throws a certain light on this point. According to Baldwin, blue is one of the first colors to be singled out; but he does not tell us how the colors he used (which did not, unfortunately, include yellow the child's favorite according to other observers) were related in point of luminosity.[3]
No doubt a child of three or four is apt to conceive a special liking for a particular color, which favorite he is wont to appropriate as "my color." A collection of such perfectly spontaneous preferences is a desideratum in the study of the first manifestations of a feeling for color. Care must be taken in observing these selections to eliminate the effects of association, and the unintentional influence of example and authority, as when a child takes to a particular color because it is "mamma's color" that is, the one she appears to affect in her dress and otherwise.
