The Theory of Colouring

1872. BACON, J. The Theory of Colouring. Being an Analysis of the Principles of Contrast and Harmony in the Arrangement of Colours with Their Application to the Study of Nature and Hints on the Composition of Pictures. viii, 58 pp., illustrated with 6 colour plates, plus 48 pp. of advertisements for artists' materials. 8vo, 183 x 120 mm, bound in publisher's blue pebbled cloth stamped in blind, title gilt on front cover, a.e.g. London: George Rowney, 1872. Second revised edition. A standard work of which Herbert says: "In the next generation of British writers, one continues to feel a modern sense of color that is usually regarded as a prerogative of French Impressionists. The manual by Bacon stresses binary and triadic color harmonies unencumbered by the long disquisitions on aesthetics that mark most French treatises, and its plates, although in rather conservative figurative imagery, show color opposites directly opposed, and three color harmonies, that look forward to Neo-Impressionism and Fauvism." Yale Library Gazette, July 1974, p. 14. Birren Collection 23.