Without the experimentation of artist and scientist through out the last 300 years our understanding of how colour-vision works would not be at the stage it is at today. It started with Isaac Newton who studied how the colour actually reaches the eye, but did not study how people subjectively see colour. Artist then began to study subjective colour observations in order to get a greater understanding of how it was perceived. Goethe studied the how an after image and other subject observations were perceived and worked in his 1400 page paper Farbenlehre. His study then lead two painters to expand on his work, Phillip Otto Runge and J.W.M. Turner, who expanded on Goethe's work by adding light and shade as a component of colour and giving colours symbolic meanings. Ogden Rood, in the early 1900's released a book which became a handbook for artists which took the ideas of the previous perception of colour and put it in a way which was easy to read. He also stated that colour does not need to mixed on a palette but just by putting two colours next to each other on a canvas the eye would mix them together. The artist from then on started painting more emotive paintings rather than those based off narrative and so colour was used more to get an idea across rather than an accurate representation of the subjects of the painting.
Reference
Gage, J. (1993). Colours of the Mind in Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (pp.191-212). New York: Thames and Hudson.
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