The Ornamented Being

Which colour do you like?

1) Isaac Newton is credited with the development of the first color wheel in 1666. The color wheel pictured below, circulated in Europe in the late 17th century by an author known as C.B., is based on Newton’s beliefs about color.

2) In the late 18th century, Moses Harris elaborated on the Newtonian color wheel by charting not only pure colors, but the various shades of those colors as well. If we consider the Newtonian wheel to be a one-dimensional representation of color, then Harris’s wheel introduces a second dimension.

3) A breakthrough occurred in 1810 when Philipp Runge portrayed color not as a one-dimensional or two-dimensional color wheel, but as a three-dimensional sphere.