Abstract
Scientists who studied color were also consumers of colored goods, manifesting a dual identity that sometimes engendered epistemological misgivings. This essay examines the relationship between colored goods and color science through an examination of the color work of philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and his sometimes friend, physicist Ogden Rood. While scientists needed colored goods in order to study the nature of color, they frequently balked at the suggestion that science and consumer culture could be so closely related. Rossi details the epistemological maneuverings contrived by scientists such as Peirce and Rood when they went shopping for colors–maneuverings designed to insure that the colors they studied were objects of science, whereas the items they purchased were objects of commerce.
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- 1.
Rood is today particularly well known as one of the scientists who most influenced French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. For a short synopsis of his influence in this respect, see Martin Kemp, “The Impressionists’ Bible,” Nature, May 1, 2008, 37. See also Phoebe Pool, Impressionism (New York, 1967), 243–44. Rood also had a noteworthy influence on architecture; see, for example, Lauren S. Weingarden, “The Colors of Nature: Louis Sullivan’s Architectural Polychromy and Nineteenth-Century Color Theory,” Winterthur Portfolio 20, no. 4 (Winter 1985): 243–60; and William W. Braham, “Solidity of the Mask: Color Contrasts in Modern Architecture,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 39 (Spring 2001): 192–214. As an example of Rood’s usefulness to philologists, see Edward W. Hopkins, “Words for Color in the Rig Veda,” American Journal of Philology 4, no. 2 (April 1, 1883) 179. For biographical information on Rood, consult W. LeConte Stevens, “Ogden Rood,” Science, n.s., 15 (December 5, 1902): 881–84. Faber Birren also offers a short biography of Rood in his introduction to Modern Chromatics (New York, 1973), 11–18; on Rood’s early years, see Michael Rossi, From Physics to Landscape Painting and Back Again (forthcoming).
- 2.
Upon meeting Peirce for the first time in 1861, William James famously described him as “a very ‘smart’ fellow with a great deal of character” but “pretty independent & violentsa”; see The Correspondence of William James, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley (Charlottesville, 1992), 4:43. James would prove one of Peirce’s only enduring friends. Rood was not so lucky—his friendship with Peirce soured in 1894 (Ogden Rood to Charles Peirce, March 14, 1894, Charles S. Peirce papers, MS Am 1632, Houghton Library, Harvard University). An excellent short analysis of Peirce’s life vis-à-vis the development of pragmatism can be found in Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York, 2001), 151–201. For a short overview of Peirce’s color work, see Thomas C. Cadwallader, “Charles S. Perice (1839–1914): The First American Experimental Psychologist,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 10, no. 3 (July 1974): 291–98. The question of whether it is possible to retrospectively call Rood and Peirce’s practice “experimental psychology” is an open one, though certainly some of Peirce’s students at Johns Hopkins University (such as Christine Ladd Franklin and Joseph Jastrow) became psychologists as the discipline emerged and credited Peirce with a measure of influence.
- 3.
John Hamilton Gourlie, The Origin and History of “The Century” (New York, 1856), 5.
- 4.
“Exposition of Textile Fabric and A. T. Stewart’s Store—A Magnificent Display,” New York Times, February 9, 1871.
- 5.
“Fall Opening at A. T. Stewart’s: An Extensive Display of Attractive Novelties,” New York Times, October 4, 1881.
- 6.
Ogden Rood to Charles Peirce, July 31, 1889, Charles S. Peirce Papers, MS Am 1632 (L 382) Houghton Library, Harvard University.
- 7.
Christine Ladd-Franklin, “Color-Introspection on the Part of the Eskimo,” Psychological Review 8, no. 4 (July 1901): 399.
- 8.
A. Hume, “Spinning and Weaving: Their Influence on Popular Language and Literature,” Ulster Journal of Archaeology 5 (1857): 93–110. Hume only identifies the siege of a “Moorish” town. In other etymologies of the color Isabel, the princess is identified as Isabella Clara Eugenia, whose husband, Archduke Albert of Austria, besieged Ostend from 1601 to 1604.
- 9.
“Isabelline as a Colour,” Notes and Queries (September 24, 1904): 253.
- 10.
Writers throughout the nineteenth century used “Isabel” and “Isabella” interchangeably—often with a clarifying modifier (“Isabel yellow,” for example)—to name the color. In this chapter I do not correct the orthography and usage of individual commentators, insofar as it is clear that all refer to the same color.
- 11.
“Scientific Intelligence: Constitution of the Chemistry of Platinum Metals,” American Journal of Science 79, no. 87 (May 1860): 426
- 12.
Andrew Ure, Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures, and Mines Containing a Clear Exposition of their Principles and Practice (New York, 1863), 839.
- 13.
Oliver Cummings Farrington, “Catalogue of the Meteorites of North America,” Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences 13 (1866): 141.
- 14.
M. E. Wadsworth, “On the Trachyte of Marblehead Neck, Massachusetts,” Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History 21 (1883): 290.
- 15.
Baron R. Osten Sacken, “Description of Some New Genera and Species of North American Limnobina,” Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Philadelphia 4 (1865): 232.
- 16.
Botanical Survey of Nebraska: Report on Collections Made in 1892 (Lincoln, NE, 1892), 15.
- 17.
“New York Fashions: Spring Millinery. Pokes, Small Bonnets, Etc. Round Hats. The Greuze Capote. Materials For Trimming. Stylish Colors, Etc. Manner Of Trimming. Varieties,” Harper’s Bazar, March 3, 1883, 131.
- 18.
“The Fashions,” New York Evening Post, February 5, 1885.
- 19.
Emmiline Raymond, “Paris Fashions,” Harper’s Bazaar, April 4, 1891, 252.
- 20.
Grant Allen, The Colour-Sense: Its Origin and Development (London, 1892), 251.
- 21.
“New Fashions,” Harper’s Bazaar, February 18, 1882, 99.
- 22.
Robert Ridgway, A Nomenclature of Colors for Naturalists and Compendium of Useful Knowledge for Ornithologists, (Boston, 1886), 26.
- 23.
“Preface,” Century Dictionary, (New York, 1891), i, xiii–xiv.
- 24.
Century Dictionary, (New York, 1891), s.v. “Green,” by Charles S. Peirce.
- 25.
Ibid., s.v. “Yellow,” by Charles S. Peirce.
- 26.
Notes on Color Words and Words about Luminosity, Charles S. Peirce papers, MS Am 1632 (1154) Houghton Library, Harvard University; italics added.
- 27.
Hermann von Helmholtz, Handbuch der physiologischen Optik (Leipzig, 1867), esp. 290–92.
- 28.
Ogden Rood, Modern Chromatics (New York, 1879), 48.
- 29.
Charles Peirce and Russell Sturgis, review of Modern Chromatics by Ogden Rood, Nation, October 16, 1879, 260.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
Christine Ladd-Franklin, undated notes, box 50, folder: Experiment to do re: vision, MS Coll Franklin, Christine Ladd-Franklin and Fabian Franklin Papers, Library of Rare Books and Special Collections, Columbia University.
- 32.
William James, “The Spatial Quale,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 13, no. 1 (January 1879): 67. To be clear, this article concerns the perception of space—not color. But James’s point was apposite to the case at hand, insofar as it concerned the limits of true introspection. For James, the arrangement of color in space—as proposed, for example, by Albert H. Munsell—was anathema because it did not truly represent mental phenomena.
- 33.
Experimenters using the wheel for color matching frequently found it necessary to include black in addition to the three optical primaries, in part in order to mimic the differential reflectance of material objects.
- 34.
Color Experiment, Charles S. Peirce Papers, MS Am 1632 (1019) Houghton Library, Harvard University.
- 35.
Rood, Modern Chromatics, 221.
- 36.
Charles Peirce to Ogden Rood, n.d. (probably 1878), Charles S. Peirce Papers, MS Am 1632 (1018) Houghton Library, Harvard University
- 37.
Notebook, February 1877, Charles S. Peirce Papers, MS Am 1632 (1018) Houghton Library, Harvard University.
- 38.
For remembrances of Bradley and the early days of the Milton Bradley Company by friends and executives of the corporation, as well as for some material by Bradley himself, see the commemorative publication by the Milton Bradley Company on the occasion of the company’s fiftieth anniversary: Milton Bradley, a Successful Man (New York, 1910). James J. Shea’s It’s All in the Game (New York, 1960) is a longer and more extensively researched account of Bradley’s life, authored by the mid-twentieth-century president of the corporation to celebrate the company’s centennial.
- 39.
Christine Ladd-Franklin, box 50, folder: Charts, Christine Ladd-Franklin and Fabian Franklin papers.
- 40.
Benjamin Joy Jeffries to Sylvester Rosa Koehler, March 11, 1877, in “Benjamin Joy Jeffries, Correspondence, 1877–1891,” Crerar Ms 202, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago.
- 41.
Regina Lee Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2012), 46–50.
- 42.
“Notebook entitled “Color Miscellaneous,” June 10, 1886, Charles S. Peirce Papers, MS Am 1632 (1016) Houghton Library, Harvard University.
- 43.
Rood, Modern Chromatics, 222.
- 44.
Ibid., 222–23.
- 45.
Ridgway, A Nomenclature of Color for Naturalists, 27.
- 46.
Ibid., 34.
- 47.
Christine Ladd-Franklin, box 58, folder: R. Ridgway, Christine Ladd-Franklin and Fabian Franklin Papers.
- 48.
Christine Ladd-Franklin, box 53, folder: TS of PP7-8 of Journal paper by CLF of color experiment, Christine Ladd-Franklin and Fabian Franklin Papers.
- 49.
Rood, Modern Chromatics, v–vi.
- 50.
Century Dictionary, (New York, 1891), s.v. “Isabel,” by Charles S. Peirce.
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Rossi, M. (2017). Let’s Go Color Shopping with Charles Sanders Peirce: Color Scientists as Consumers of Color. In: Blaszczyk, R., Spiekermann, U. (eds) Bright Modernity. Worlds of Consumption. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50745-3_6
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