A colour-circle based on four colours, red, blue, green and yellow, divided into a total of 3 x 4 = 12 segments. Orange and violet, which Schiffermüller saw as being insufficiently strong, cannot be counted amongst the «subsidiary colours». In part, his colour-circle is provided with rather fanciful names: blue, sea-green, green, olive-green, yellow, orange-yellow, fire-red, red, crimson, violet-red, violet-blue and fire-blue. (Detailed text)
In the same year that J.H.Lambert constructed his colour pyramid and demonstrated for the first time that the complete fullness of colours can only be reproduced within a three dimensional system, another colour circle was published in Vienna by Ignaz Schiffermüller. The circumference of Schiffermüller’s circle is filled with twelve colours to which he has given some very fanciful names: blue, sea-green, green, olive-green, yellow, orange-yellow, fire-red, red, crimson, violet-red, violet-blue and fire-blue. The transitions are continuous — in marked contrast to Moses Harris — and the three primary colours of blue, yellow and red are not placed at equal distances from each other; between them come three kinds of green, two kinds of orange and four variations of violet (excluding the secondary colour violet). Schiffermüller selects a total of 12 colours and thus draws upon the system originated by the French Jesuit Louis Bertrand Castel, who had published his Optique des couleurs in 1740 in order to extend Newton’s circle with its seven colours up to twelve. His choice sounds unusual: bleu, celadon (pale green), vert, olive, jaune, fauve (pale red), nacarat (orange), rouge, cramoisi, violet, agathe (agate blue) and bleu violant. Castel linked his system to music — more specifically, the twelve semi-tones of the musical scale.
But whereas Castel attempted to undermine Newton’s theory and reject it, Schiffermüller’s undertaking achieved the exact opposite: his system served to illustrate Newton’s discovery that the pure colours could be arranged in a circle. The Viennese entomologist — a butterfly specialist — was one of the first to arrange the complementary colours opposite one another: blue opposite orange; yellow opposite violet; red opposite sea green. Schiffermüller also placed a sun (only suggested here) inside his colour circle in order to emphasise that he wished to show «the radiant colours» produced by nature. Whilst wishing to achieve «vivacious and gleaming colours» like the wondrous colours of the rainbow, he considered further combinations of «subsidiary colours» as aesthetically unsuitable.
By 1771, Schiffermüller had come to feel that it was time to treat colours as a natural system and bestow upon them a kind of natural order — exactly as had been done for so long with animals, plants and minerals. Such an order would have been an indispensable aid to the descriptive methods common amongst naturalists at the end of the 18th century. In his Colour and Culture, John Gage recounts the story told by the painter William Williams in 1787 about an entomological illustrator who, «living in a remote country, unacquainted with artists, or any rational system of colours, with a patience that would have surmounted any difficulties, had collected a multiplicity of shells of colour, of every various tint that could be discerned in the wing of that beautiful insect [the butterfly]; for he had no idea that out of two he could make a third, by this method he had collected two large hampers full of shells, which he placed on each side of him, and sometimes the individual tint he wanted, was half a day’s labour to find out. What excellence must he have arrived at, had he known how to mix his tints.»
Date: The colour-circle was published in Vienna in 1772.
Country of origin: Austria
Basic colours: Red, blue, green and yellow
Form: Circle
Related systems: Newton — Lambert
Bibliography: Schiffermüller, «Versuch eines Farbensystems», Vienna 1772; C. Parkhurst and R. L. Feller, «Who invented the Color Wheel?», Color Research and Application 7, pp. 217-230 (1982); John Gage, «Colour and Culture, Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction», Thames and Hudson, 1993, p. 170 (mention and comment)