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I was puzzled recently by an art critic’s confident assertion that red and green are complementary—he was pointing to a red something like and a green something like . I decided to investigate. I now have some clues about the cause of his confusion.
People have been using the colour wheel for a long time. For example, Newton had produced a colour wheel by the early 1700s and Goethe painted one in the 1800s. As far as I can tell from reproductions, Goethe’s was remarkably accurate considering the limitations of the technology available to him. It included six colours, which were reasonably similar in hue but darker and less saturated than those in my illustrations. He did not use the colour names that I use in these notes.
Early versions of the colour wheel were frequently mentioned in textbooks that used
monochrome illustrations and described the colours in words.
It became usual to label magenta as red
and cyan as blue
,
so the subtractive primaries cyan, magenta and yellow
became blue, red and yellow
.
Similarly, the complementary pairs red-cyan, green-magenta and blue-yellow became
orange-blue
, green-red
and violet-yellow
.
Having different names for the correct hues would not have mattered but…