The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors: and Their Applications to the Arts

Many of the sentences in this book run on longer than a paragraph and because of the clumsy writing, very often one hardly knows what the author means. It's not improbable that some of his sentences make just as much sense read backward. This prolix and eccentric kind of writing isn't helped by the even clumsier (1850s) English translation.Chevreul was a scientist, not a professional writer. And while he supplies a list of definitions of his terms, he nevertheless uses terms that are not defined, leaving the reader in further confusion. Worst of all, Chevreul uses a hundred words where a dozen would have sufficed.Re. the edition, there are some typos and the editor seems to favor a style of English that went out in the late 19th century (strange for a person living in the 1980s). As such, the editorial language leaves much to be desired. In addition, there are insufficient annotations that would have helped the casual reader plow through this muddle.The book is useful, however, as an eccentrically-written reference work. And there are a number of the re-created original illustrations.

They included all the text but did not include any of the illustrations. If you have a good imagination you may be able to get the information on color, but it is difficult when ALL THE ILLUSTRATIONS ARE MISSING.

Many artists seem to feel that books like this which take a scientific aproach to color theory are dated and useless. I feel like those are the types of artists who would rather come up with excuses for their color choices after the fact than actually justify them before-hand by studying the way light wavelengths interact with eachother.this isn't new science and it's not a set of rules which will make you brilliant at picking colors, but it does shed some light (9_9) on why certain colors look the way they do in juxtaposition with eachother and allows a more informed choice in the way optical mixtures are created for design and artistic applications.

Very Nice Book!Chevreul just wanted to understand about colors so he experimented and it tells you how he did and got to his principles.Many famous painters have used his principles to understand and use colors, Delaunay, Seurat, Pissarro, Delacroix, and many others.If you are into Painting it will definetly help you!Its hard to read cause its very technical but excelent once you understand his works!Has Very Good Color prints of the originals and New Remastered prints of the originals made digitaly to show better the colors.

Focuses on what colors look like...very different from art books that only care about mixing paint. Inspired me to experiment in anyway I never would have otherwise. See the results if you follow me on Instagram...janeattherock

very good book from a historical perspective. i thank Chevreul for what he did for color theory.

Well I'm still poring through it but heard about it on a PBS art show so can't go wrong. It's academic so expect to do some hard thinking.

The product description and top reviews lead one to believe this book about color includes color reproductions -- it does not!This book is entirely in black & white, making it essentially useless as a resource.

Excelente informacion de uno de los mejores teoricos del color en la Historia, todo un clasico que un pintor debe estudiar

Great.

Excellent book. Very informative and interesting

Useful tool for any painter, thoughtful yet easy to read. Still dipping into it as I go along so my first impressions are positive if a touch incomplete.