Emily Vanderpoel’s Color Problems
A Practical Manual for the Lay Student of Color
A key publication from a pioneering female thinker, Emily Noyes Vanderpoel’s Color Problems pairs practical colour theory with gridded studies that were decades ahead of their time.
Book Description
A key publication from a pioneering female thinker, Emily Noyes Vanderpoel’s Color Problems pairs practical colour theory with gridded studies that were decades ahead of their time.
First published in 1902, Color Problems is a landmark work by Emily Noyes Vanderpoel, a New York painter, author, and colour theorist. Building on the colour science of Newton, Goethe, Chevreul, and Rood, she set out to make the subject genuinely useful to the people who work with colour every day. Her unique guide presents accessible colour science to appeal across the disciplines, creating a way of teaching colour aimed at hobbyists and everyday readers.
Vanderpoel was among the first to explore how colours behave alongside one another, breaking down images into grids of coloured squares – analytical diagrams that read startlingly like modern abstract paintings. Little noticed in her own lifetime, her work was also among the earliest colour treatises written by a woman.
This edition reproduces Vanderpoel’s original text and plates in full, including the celebrated colour grids. A key text for anyone studying colour or its history, Color Problems has become a rediscovered classic for designers and artists alike.
Publisher's Note
For the designer, the colourist, and anyone drawn to abstract art, Emily Noyes Vanderpoel’s Color Problems looks like nothing else of its age – its gridded colour studies anticipating modern abstraction.
Pre-empting the abstract art movement by 50 years is one thing, but building it off foundational, scientific theories and reframing it to appeal to the masses under the guise of female gentility is a great achievement. We find the subjects in her studies utterly charming; the presentation of unique antique objects adds a learned quality to her observations, while the more whimsical expressions of storm clouds and shadows in the snow give her writing an accessible authority. She romanticised colour theory, and made it beautiful while doing it.
“I’d never seen colour theory presented in the way that Vanderpoel did. Except, in my studies of artworks of the greats like Seurat and Mondrian, when I didn’t even know I was looking at it.”— Emily, Editor
Book Features:
- A facsimile of Emily Noyes Vanderpoel’s 1902 Color Problems: A Practical Manual for the Lay Student of Color.
- 117 colour plates including the celebrated ten-by-ten gridded compositions.
- Vanderpoel’s full text, building on the theories of Chevreul, Rood, Newton, and Goethe.
- Gridded colour studies that prefigure the work of Josef Albers and twentieth-century abstraction.
- A distinctive gift and coffee table book for designers, colour lovers, and lovers of vintage design.
Table of Contents:
Contents:
- Color Problems by Emily Noyes Vanderpoel
- Colour in Design by May Morris, 1893
- A World of Colour by Bonnie E. Snow, 1920
- Emily Noyes Vanderpoel: A Short Biography
- Bibliography & Further Reading
Editorial Reviews:
“[Vanderpoel], in her “Colour Problems,”… has aimed to combine the essential results of the scientific and artistic study of colour in concise, practical form, and to classify the study of colour in individual eyes, in light, in history, and in nature.”—Brush and Pencil, 1908
“Merely to gaze at the plates one after another is an education of the taste.”—The School Arts Book, 1908
“A great deal will be found in these pages that will be of practical service, particularly to those who have not been able to read the works of Chevreul, Von Bezold, Rood, Church, and others.”—Bernard Quaritch, 1911
Extract
From a scientific standpoint, admirable works on colour have been written, but they demand more time and study than many can give them, and are too theoretical to be easily understood; while those written from an artistic standpoint may be useful to those who paint pictures but are not of much benefit to larger classes of people who are artists in other occupations. Painters of pictures must study colour as well as lines and composition; but a better understanding of colour would also be of great value to decorators, designers, lithographers, florists, dressmakers, and milliners… and many others. For such, to combine the essential results of the scientific and artistic study of colour in a concise practical manual, and to classify the study of colour in individual eyes, in light, in history, and in nature, has been the aim.
—Emily Noyes Vanderpoel, Preface to Color Problems, 1902
More About This Work
Vanderpoel was a New York painter, scholar, and historian, and a member of the New York Watercolor Club. Color Problems was published by Longmans, Green and Company in New York in 1902, in an edition of around one thousand copies. The 117 grid compositions for which the book is now best known were Vanderpoel’s own colour experiments – attempts to systematically catalogue the visual behaviour of colours placed in close proximity. In seeking to understand the effect of colour on the eye, the imagination, and the emotions, she produced diagrams of a quiet, geometric elegance that have since come to be admired as works of art in their own right.
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