Enjoying nature and appreciating colour often go hand in hand. For artists representing the natural world in their artworks, colour will almost certainly be central to the process. I wasn't going to do another book review so soon, but this book is so wonderful I just couldn't wait and with an upcoming series of blog posts on the topic of colour, I realised that it would be useful to introduce this book first. 'Nature's Palette' describes itself as a 'chromatic catalogue of the natural world' and it certainly is. It develops Patrick Syme's expanded version of 'Werner's Nomenclature of Colours' (1821), and illustrates and updates it in the most beautiful way. The book is a fantastic resource for artists, lovers of nature and anyone interested in the history of how we organise our thoughts on colour. Read on to find out more...
Nature's Palette (2021), Thames and Hudson: London.
Nature's Palette was published to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Patrick Syme's expanded version of 'Werner's Nomenclature of Colours' (1821). Syme's guide attempted to establish a universal reference system for colours that could be used to help identify species from the natural world. Nature's palette takes these colour swatches and descriptions, and matches them with illustrated examples from the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms.
Each named colour has at least one example of a natural item that displays that colour. This was intended to act as a reference, so that the colour could become standardised. Not every colour had a reference from each of the animal, vegetable and mineral categories in Syme's 1821 publication, as indicated by the blank boxes in the table above. Nature's Palette adds in these examples on the pages devoted to illustrating the colours.
The illustrations are all nineteenth-century depictions of the reference species and specimens, so this book is a real treat for those who like artwork from this era.
One of the really exciting elements of Nature's Palette is the reference table showing the CYMK and Pantone numbers of all the 110 colours featured in the book, alongside the equivalent paint colour name in Winsor and Newton and Caran D'Ache artists paints, and Little Greene and Farrow and Ball decorating paints. This takes the book to a whole new level of usefulness and really modernises the work started by Syme in 1821.
As well as the tables and pages concerned with the colour references, Nature's Palette contains chapters by relevant experts on the history of Werner's Nomenclature of Colours and how it was adapted and used over the years. There is also a section on colour, more generally, and a very comprehensive bibliography and list of illustration sources.
The book is beautifully produced and contains many pages featuring additional illustrations and specimen collections in which the colours have been identified according to Syme's classification.
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