© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
R. Shamey, R. G. KuehniPioneers of Color Sciencehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30811-1_53

53. Munsell, Albert Henry 1858–1918

Renzo Shamey1   and Rolf G. Kuehni1  
(1)
Color Science and Imaging Laboratory, North Carolina State University, Wilson College of Textiles, Raleigh, NC, USA
 
 
Renzo Shamey (Corresponding author)
Email: rshamey@ncsu.edu
 
Rolf G. Kuehni
Email: rolf_kuehni@ncsu.edu
53.1 Munsell Color Order System
References
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Photograph from Munsell, 1905

Munsell was born on January 6, 1858, in Boston M.A. where his father was in the piano business. After high school, he attended the Massachusetts Normal Art School in Boston. In 1879, he studied Ogden Rood’s influential book Modern Chromatics. In 1881, he was named an instructor and later a lecturer at this school, positions he held for 25 years. He was awarded a scholarship that made it possible for him to study from 1885 to 1888 at the Académie Julian and the École Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and one year in Rome. After he returned, he was an active painter of portraits and seascapes. In 1889, he received a patent for an adjustable artist’s easel. In 1894, he married Julia Orr, the daughter of a New York financier, with whom he had a son, Albert Ector Orr Munsell, and three daughters. Munsell died on July 28, 1918, in Brookline MA [1].

53.1 Munsell Color Order System

As a lecturer at the art school, Munsell became concerned with how to teach students about colors in a meaningful manner. In 1899, he developed a model of a balanced color sphere that, when spun rapidly, resulted in a gray appearance, thus showing a kind of color balance (see portrait above). He received a patent for it in 1900 [2]. Munsell met O. N. Rood, then professor of physics in New York, in 1899 showing him his color sphere, with Rood commenting positively on it. Simultaneously, Munsell concerned himself with the design of the interior of the color sphere. In April 1900, he sketched a hue circle based on the decimal system, with five primary, five secondary, and ten intermediate hues. It continues to be the basis of the modern system. Munsell, from his studies in painting, had a clear idea of lightness or value, as it was typically called in painters’ circles. In 1901, he obtained a patent for a photometer he called a luminometer. It was manufactured in small numbers in the following years [3]. The basic question of using a logarithmic or a power root scale to relate the physical data of the luminometer to perceived lightness in his system was a question not fully resolved until after Munsell’s death. In 1902, Munsell hand-plotted color intensity and lightness data for different pigments, earlier established by W. Abney, and realized that a sphere was an incomplete representation of perceived object colors. As a result, he began to name his color solid a “color tree.” Having established a hue circle and a subjective lightness scale, he was aware that for completeness he needed to define a chromatic intensity scale. It is not established how he arrived at the term “chroma” for that purpose. In March 1902, he sketched a color solid based on the three attributes, as shown in Fig. 53.1 [4]. Samples were to be spaced according to perceptual differences, and Munsell began to establish such samples to fill limited hue pages. Munsell described the system in A color notation, first published in 1905 [5]. A first edition of the Atlas of the Munsell color system was published in 1907 containing eight charts of painted samples of ten different hues [6]. In the 1915 edition of the atlas, the number of samples was doubled. Munsell also introduced artist’s tools based on his system: Munsell crayons and Munsell watercolors. As a painter, Munsell was interested in color harmony and he established nine principles based on his color solid [7].
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Fig. 53.1

Munsell’s schematic depiction of the color tree [6]

Throughout the development of the system, he consulted with a broad group of scientists and artists and gave many presentations in the USA and in Europe. In 1917, he formed the Munsell Color Company to operate the business producing the atlas. After his passing, it was taken over by his son A. E. O. Munsell and other stockholders. At about the same time the National Bureau of Standards began to show interest in the system and supported sample measurement and expansion of the system. An enlarged edition with 20 hues was published in 1929 [8]. In the 1940s, extensive experiments were made under the auspices of the Optical Society of America resulting in the Munsell Renotations [9], colorimetric definitions of a revised version of samples of the atlas that continue to be the basis of the modern system. Munsell’s system is perhaps the most important color atlas system yet developed.

The history of the development of the Munsell system has been described in more detail by Nickerson [10] and by Kuehni [11].