Chromatlas

Person

Michel Eugène Chevreul

A chemist who lived to 102, explained soap, and showed painters that colors change their neighbors.

Lived
1786–1889 (aged 102)
Gobelins dye director
From 1824
Contrast book
1839 (English 1854)

Michel Eugène Chevreul (1786–1889) was a chemist first. His studies of animal fats explained how soap forms and improved candle-making; he isolated and named stearic and oleic acids. His name is one of the 72 engraved on the Eiffel Tower. He lived to 102, and France celebrated his 100th birthday as a national event.

In 1824 he became director of dyeing at the Gobelins tapestry works in Paris. Complaints about dull black wool led him to simultaneous contrast: colors seen side by side shift away from each other in hue and lightness, so a good black beside blues and violets looks weak and reddish. His 1839 book on the 'law of simultaneous contrast' gave rules for tapestries, gardens, clothing, maps and painting, including harmonies of similar and of contrasting colors.

Painters took it as a manual. The Impressionists absorbed his ideas about complementary contrast, and Camille Pissarro, explaining the method Seurat had pioneered, said it rested on “the theory of colors discovered by M. Chevreul.” That method, separate dots that mix in the eye, became optical mixing and La Grande Jatte.

At 100 he sat for a series of conversations photographed by Paul Nadar, the first photo-interview published in a magazine. Over a century later, Josef Albers's Interaction of Color turned his discovery into a classroom course: no color is seen alone.

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