For centuries, artists and scientists have debated whether colour is an inherent property of objects or merely a construct of human perception. Isaac Newton's famous prism experiments in the seventeenth century demonstrated that white light could be split into a spectrum, yet even he acknowledged that 'the rays, to speak properly, are not coloured.'
This distinction between the physics of light and the experience of colour has profound implications. Languages differ enormously in how they carve up the colour spectrum, with some having only two or three basic colour terms while others have dozens.
Researchers in the field have shown that speakers of languages with a dedicated term for light blue, such as Russian, can distinguish between shades of blue faster than English speakers, who use a single word for the entire range. The art world has long grappled with these questions from a practical standpoint. When the synthetic pigment known as Prussian blue was accidentally created in a Berlin laboratory in 1704, it transformed European painting almost overnight.
The pigment's affordability and versatility meant that a colour previously accessible only to the wealthiest patrons could now appear in works produced for a much broader audience. Yet the cultural significance of colour extends far beyond the artist's palette. In many East Asian societies, white has traditionally been associated with mourning and death, a stark contrast to its Western connotations of purity and innocence.
These associations are not arbitrary; they are deeply embedded in religious symbolism, historical practice, and collective memory, making them remarkably resistant to globalising pressures. The commercial exploitation of colour adds another dimension to this already complex picture. In the twentieth century, corporations began to recognise that specific hues could trigger predictable emotional responses in consumers.
The legal battles over colour trademarks — such as Tiffany's claim to its distinctive robin's-egg blue — reveal the extent to which a simple wavelength of light can become a valuable piece of intellectual property. More recently, neuroscientists have begun mapping the precise neural pathways involved in colour perception, discovering that the brain constructs colour through a far more elaborate process than was previously understood.
This research suggests that our experience of colour is not a passive reception of wavelengths but an active, interpretive process — one shaped as much by expectation, memory, and context as by the light entering the eye.