Inspired by science
In their March 2021 paper, Tager and his colleagues describe how contemporary developments in color theory and their adoption by Impressionist painters may naturally have led to an increase in the use of violet from 1863 onwards.
Interestingly, in the early years of the Impressionist movement, we see Smyth promoting in his Sidereal Chromatics “the laws of harmonious alliance and contrast of colour — that yellow is of all hues the nearest related to light, and its complementary violet or purple to darkness.” The above quote seems to indicate that Smyth was familiar with Goethe’s analysis of the sensory and psychological effects induced by different colors, which he published in his 1810 work Theory of Colors.
Smyth then goes on to say, “Many of the observed tints of stellar companions would of course turn out to be merely complementary [colors] and caused by the law of simultaneous contrast.” This concept, introduced by French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul (and inspired by Goethe) in his 1839 The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours, blossomed around the time that Smyth was making his color observations, some 25 years before he published Sidereal Chromatics.
Chevreul’s law stated that when two adjacent colors are observed, their perceived colors shift toward the complementary color of the adjacent color. For a binary star that contains a bright, slightly orange-yellow star next to a white star, Chevreul’s law predicts that the human eye will see the color of that white star shifted toward violet. That’s because violet is the complementary color to yellow, as they are opposing hues on a color wheel. These inferences suggest that science theory had begun to make its mark on visual telescopic observations by the mid-19th century.
And it was this type of optical effect (simultaneous contrast for colors) that the Impressionists sought to capture and exploit in their works. This allowed them to create even stronger color contrasts — a canvas bristling with scientific proof that what the eye perceived and the brain understood were two different things. “Impressionist painters used the colour violet so prolifically,” Tager wrote for Psyche, “that critics accused them of violettomania.”
While the range of colors of stars are limited to hues that vary from reddish orange to pale blue, what our eye-brain system sees depends on many factors. These include atmospheric clarity, the telescope used, contrast, and bias (from knowledge of a star’s spectral class and color temperature), among others. But don’t let that stop you from recording what you see rather than what you are expected to see.
And as always, report what you see or don’t see to sjomeara31@gmail.com.