In 1824 Louis XVIII had a problem. People were complaining that the colours of the threads on his prestigious Gobelins (tapestries) didn’t match the colours of the threads they were shown to them in the showroom.
Now this may not seem like a Life-changing problem, but it lead to one of the most important discoveries of it’s era.
At that time the Manufacture Royale des Gobelins, the most prestigious tapestry factory in Paris, was an important source of revenue for Louis XVIII who had returned to France to restore the monarchy, following the defeat of Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo and many beheadings at the guillotine.
Louis XVIII appointed a renowned chemist Michel Eugene Chevreul, who had become famous for his work on the making of soaps and candles from oils and fats. Bear in mind that this is before the discovery of penicillin and before the harnessing of electricity in people’s everyday lives.
Chevreul lived a spartan life and dedicated himself to his science. Only eating two meals a day, at 7 AM and 7 PM so that he wouldn’t waste time eating when there was research to be done.
Chevreul began to look at the problem of the chemistry of the dyes used and could find no degradation or changes once they were fixed and then woven into the Gobelins. He established that the wool used was of the highest quality and surpassed all others. So, he could not find any physical or chemical reason why the colours should change between the dying and demonstration of the yarn to the customers and the weaving into the Tapestries. Something else must be going on.
What Chevreul discovered was that it had nothing to do with the quality of the materials but had everything to do with perception. What had changed wasn’t the vibrancy or colour-fastness of the yarns, it was the CONTEXT in which they were being seen. Colours looked different when they are seen separately and on their own than when they are seen alongside another, differently colour of yarn.
The problem was in the perception of the viewer. People weren’t seeing objective reality, they were seeing what their brains saw, IN CONTEXT.
Chevreul may not have fully appreciated why at the time, but he did recognize that things can change if the context in which we see it changes.
It took Chevreul nearly 10 years to publish his findings in “The Principles of Harmony and Contrast Colours” and he named the phenomena Simultaneous contrast. “One colour placed beside another receives a modification from it… it is only really only applied to the modification that takes place before us when we perceive the simultaneous impressions of these two colours”.
Chevreul saw that our perception of reality happens in our minds rather than outside it.
The image above demonstrates the importance of context. The cat is the same colour in every instance (yes, it really is!) Even when you know that it’s an illusion, it stubbornly persists. Our eyes receive the information and our minds put it into context by comparison with it’s surroundings. It’s all relative.
This discovery lead to ripples through many other fields too and lead to the foundation of colour theory still used by artists today.
The artist Eugene Delacroix, a contemporary of Chevreul boasted that he could “paint the face of Venus in mud, provided you let me surround it as I will”.
This lead to artists painting more “true” and less “realistic” works, and, of course lead to the impressionists who painted the “light” and it’s emotional effect rather than the “naturalistic” narrative.
Context is everything. Our brains deal with relationships not with absolutes. This is because meaning can’t be made in a vacuum. Context and relationships are constantly changing.
We have pattern-making brains that actively search for the relationship between things and their “usefulness” to our survival. We detect differences and connections and make perceptual adjustments in order to make meaning out of meaningless information. Our brains take all the relationships it receives from the context and assigns a meaning to them that is useful, rather than accurate.
What Chevreul discovered not only changed how we understand colour, but also changed how we understand perception and that Context is everything.