Much of the history of art education has consisted of artists learning techniques and practices through apprenticeship. Prior to industrialization, much of this instruction pertained to creating tools for engaging in artistic work.
De Diversis Artibus (The Various Arts) by the twelfth-century Benedictine monk Theophilus Presbyter is an example of an early workshop manual. Presbyter provides specific recipes for making paint, information on how to prepare grounds for painting, and instruction on how many coats of paint and varnish should be applied.
An 1866 manuscript, “Gilbert Stuart's Method of Painting a Portrait,” carries on this tradition, demonstrating how Stuart arranged his palette and outlining the steps he took in applying paint.
As colors and materials started being mass-produced, manuals moved away from recipes to feature information on using colors to achieve specific effects. The English chemist and pigment manufacturer George Field (1777-1854) published Chromatography in 1835; this work not only discussed the qualities of specific colors, but also laid out a scientific theory of color. Field's work was the standard text on color through the nineteenth century, and the paint manufacturer Winsor & Newton published an edition of the work in 1880. These inexpensive editions of artists' manuals were frequently used by nineteenth-century manufacturers to promote their products, such as paintbrushes, and the Winsor & Newton edition contains a catalog similar to the J. Barnard & Sons price catalog shown here, which accompanied their edition of Edward Fielding's Mixed Tints, an 1836 manual on color.
Theories on color continued to develop; one of the most influential publications on this topic in the twentieth century is Josef Albers's Interaction of Color. Albers, an instructor at Yale University, published this manual in 1963. Albers's students created the examples when he assigned them projects to illustrate the ways that color appears differently based on different surroundings. The plate shown here demonstrates the way juxtaposing colors can make a color appear to vibrate.
- Presbyter, Theophilus. De Diversis Artebus. London: T. Nelson, 1961.
- “Gilbert Stuart's Method of Painting a Portrait.” Artists' Papers, 1636-1970. Portf. 1.14. Ryerson & Burnham Archives.
- Field, George. Chromatography. London: C. Tilt, 1835.
- Field, George. Field's Chromatography. London: Winsor & Newton, 1885.
- Fielding, Edward. Mixed Tints: With an Essay on Light and Color. London: J. Barnard & Son, [1880].
- Albers, Josef. Interaction of Color. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963.