A Color Notation

A man wants a “topazy yellow” room in Samoa—and a red that is neither Turkish, Roman nor Indian. Even Robert Louis Stevenson cannot name the exact shade he wants.

Writing in the early twentieth century, A. H. Munsell takes this failure of language as a practical problem: familiar names like “pea green” and “rose pink” can mean something different to every eye. He proposes a measured way to describe color through hue, value and chroma, then makes the idea tangible with an orange whose sections and layers sort colors by their qualities. The aim is more than tidy terminology: a color should have a place and a name another person can understand, whether it belongs to a faded cap or a painted room. Can color be described as precisely as a musical note?

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