WHICH ARE THE PRIMARY COLORS ?

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume I, Issue 61, 8 February 1884, Page 3

WHICH ARE THE PRIMARY COLORS ?

The accepted theory of color has at last found a disbeliever, and from having been considered an immutable fact it is now believed to be an unsound conclusion to hold that the three primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. The late Professor Maxwell has, we are told, proved beyond question that the essential primaries are red, green, and violet, so that a good many essays and elaborate works, as well as more numerous volumes of advice to painters, hihst be wrong from the very beginning, and our experienced widowdressers must believe a great part of this scientific treatment of color to be erroneous. The admission of green into the notable trio is thus accounted for: —“ The difficulties which stood in the way of an accurate.determination of the primaries were largely due to an element of confusion introduced by the use of pigments for the purpose of experiment. People who were accustomed to mix blue paint and yellow paint to produce green found it difficult to believe that the green of the spectrum was anything more than a mixture of the blue ana yellow by which it was bordered j but an admixture of the blue and yellow of the spectrum does not produce green, but white, The blue light being a compound of green with violet, and the yellow light being a compound of green with red, the two together afford the three primaries, which combine to form white. In the paints, on the contrary, the material which appears blue absorbs and quenches red, while the material which appears yellow absorbs and quenches violet: so that only the green, which is common to both, is reflected unchanged to the spectator from the mixture.— Pottery Gazette,