Over more than two thousand years, there has been, and continues to be, a wealth of wonderful work contributing to our understanding of color. This page is an outline of the best-known chapters in the story of color, and places the development of the Color Affects System in context.

There has never been a time when color did not fascinate humanity and it has always been regarded as one of life's greatest mysteries. Every civilization had (and still has today) its myths and associations with color, but oddly, none of them has named many colors. In the 1960s anthropologists Berlin and Kay conducted a worldwide study of color naming. Many languages only contained two color terms, equivalent to white (light) and black (dark). Of 98 languages studied, the highest number of basic color terms was to be found in English - where we have eleven: Black, White, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Pink, Grey and Brown. The other millions of colors have 'borrowed' names, based on examples of them, such as Avocado, Grape, Peach, Tan, Gold, etc.

The great philosopher, Aristotle, in the fourth century BC, considered blue and yellow to be the true primary colors, relating as they do to life's polarities: Sun and Moon, male and female, stimulus and sedation, expansion and contraction, out and in. Furthermore, he associated colors with the four elements: Fire, Water, Earth and Air. Artists universally adopted his principles and applied them for two thousand years, until Newton's discoveries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries replaced them in general color theory.

Hippocrates, the father of medical practice, was a contemporary of Aristotle (who apparently did not have a very high opinion of him). He used color extensively in medicine and recognized, for example, that the therapeutic effects of a white violet would be quite different from those of a purple (violet) one. Another medical man, Avicenna in the eleventh century, in what is now Iran, believed that a person's physical coloring would indicate that person's predisposition to various diseases and always took account of the patient's coloring in diagnosis.

In the fifteenth century the famous Swiss doctor, von Hohenheim, known as Paracelsus, traveled extensively and his methods were considered highly controversial - he received more attention at the time than Copernicus. He placed particular importance on the role of color in healing. Interestingly, he was a contemporary of not just Copernicus, but Martin Luther, Leonardo da Vinci and many other famous figures of the Renaissance - so his life and learning were conducted in an atmosphere of great transition in thought.

The greatest contributions to our understanding of color came from men whose work combined science and mathematics with art, metaphysics and theology - indeed the sum of human study. However, in the fifteenth century, with the arrival of humanist thinking, and Martin Luther, there was tremendous intellectual upheaval. The Church lost its grip on education and many disciplines 'went their own way' - leading to the virtual separation of art from science. Further study of color appears to have been placed in the 'Science' camp. Artists were deemed to be born with an instinct for it.

In 1672, the great scientist, Sir Isaac Newton, published his first, controversial paper on color, and forty years later, his work 'Opticks'. When Newton shone white light through a triangular prism, he found that wavelengths of light refracted at different angles, enabling him to see the separate components - colors. (He was able to shine them back through a prism and achieve white light again, but unable to see any further breakdown if he shone a single color through a prism.)

One of the history's greatest minds was that of Johannes Wolfgang von Goethe - who completely disagreed with Newton's interpretations of his own findings. Goethe's 'Theory of Colors', (translated into English in 1840 and still in print) disputes that Newton's prism experiments proved that light splits into its component colors. He felt that if Newton was right, then white light should split under all kinds of circumstances but when he himself shone white light on to a screen in a room, he found that the centre of the image remained white and colors appeared only at the edges. This led him back to Aristotle's ideas; blue is the first color to appear out of darkness (and most visible at night) and yellow is the first color to appear out of light (and the most visible color in light conditions). Hence, for example, our perception of the sun, where we are effectively looking at white light, as yellow and the sky, where we are looking into the vast blackness of space, as blue.

For almost three hundred years after Newton, all further work with color was essentially concerned with appearance and vision - and most of it strictly scientific. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, the medical community had virtually put paid to the age-old practice of color therapy, dismissing it as 'mumbo-jumbo'.

However, there was one shining example of scientific study leading to great strides in art - the work of Chevreul, the nineteenth century French chemist who, in studying the chemistry of dyeing, developed a color system that became the heart of pointillism and neo-impressionism. Artists such as Seurat and Signac only ever used Chevreul's fundamental palette of colors.

In the twentieth century, however, interest in color exploded. The art of color therapy was re-born and today even the most mainstream doctors use color as an everyday part of their work.

In the 1920s at the famous Bauhaus school, in Germany, where the teaching staff included such luminaries as Itten, Albers, Kandinsky, Mondrian and Klee, technology and art were completely reunited. Johannes Itten was particularly interested in the connections between colors and emotions, and colors and shapes. He also observed that each of his students seemed to favor the same palette for their work - and furthermore, the favored palette appeared to be in some way related to that student's own physical coloring. Itten's seminal book 'The Art of Color' is a 'must read' for anyone interested in color.

Nevertheless, when Angela Wright began to pursue deeper understanding of the effects of color, in the mid 1970s, she found that not much progress had been made since the 1920s. There was no shortage of scientific material describing experiments to establish the psychological effects of different colors. However, the findings were often contradictory and no firm theories had emerged, so it was considered totally subjective, and therefore totally unpredictable.

Her first response to this was that none of these experiments appeared to take account of the finer points of color - nuances of shade, tone and tint. It is not part of a psychologist's remit to study color, so they would, for example, describe experiments where they had 'used blue and orange, with full spectrum lighting.' She felt that this was relatively meaningless, as there are at least a million blues and just as many oranges. She felt that color harmony was a major determining factor in the psychological effect. In simple terms, disharmony negates.

She studied the dynamics of color harmony in California, working with Mrs Lorea Shearing, a member of the Kalmus family, who invented and developed Technicolor. She formed a clear hypothesis, involving the links between patterns of color and personality types, that approached color harmony from a different perspective. Going back to Aristotle's idea that blue and yellow were the true primary colors, she classified all colors, first into cool and warm, then subdivided in terms of levels of intensity and the addition of black, white or grey. This produced four tonal families, which Angela Wright then associated with four personality types, defined with considerable reference to Jung's psychology theories, particularly the concept of extraversion (yellow) and introversion (blue). She developed a clear, rational color system - the Color Affects System - enabling individual response to specific color combinations to be predicted with startling accuracy, and color psychology to be practiced with much more precision and understanding.

In the last two years the Color & Imaging Institute, at Derby University in England, have confirmed that the colors classified within the Color Affects System do indeed have mathematical relationships not previously identified.