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The Berlèse Colour Chart
In
his Monographie du genre Camellia ( Paris, 1837), Abbé
Berlèse described 282 cultivars and named their colours. Fortunately he
had added a colour chart, since it is extremely difficult to figure out
the hues and shades of colour of names given in the last century. I have
tried to transfer the colour shades in his chart to the computer,
knowing that this is almost impossible since the colour of pigments
and of a monitor tube are only faintly comparable. However, with the
computer it is easier to reproduce the chart than with pigments (which I
tried), and using the colour model of hue, saturation and brightness (in
the micrografix picture editor), it took me less than a day. On
your monitor there probably is a colour shift, but you can use an editor
like L-view to fit hue and saturation to a comfortable degree. Also, if
your monitor allows the change of colour temperature, set it around
9000°K. Berlèse arranged his colour chart in two scales. For the left,
more bluish scale I used Hue=340°. The most brilliant colour
(brightness=50%) is cherry red No. 4 (about carmine), colours above are
black diluted (decreasing brightness), those below are white diluted
(increasing brightness). For the right, more orange scale, I used
Hue=5°, and the most brilliant colour (about scarlet) is orange No. 5.
Note
that the hue impression shifts to more blue if the brightness is
increased. This happens also with pigments when they are applied thinly
or are diluted with white. In the right scale this shift was too heavy
in order to reproduce the flesh colour, therefore here the hue was
slightly increased to 9, 12 and 15° (more yellow for No. 3, 2 and 1,
respectively). Note
further that the bright colours come out with high fidelity, whereas the
darker ones are disappointing. For example, the dark cherry red No. 7 is more brown
than red. This is a difficulty found with monitors, but also with
pigments, but not that severe. The vivid, dark reds of 'Bob Hope' or
'San Dimas' are, to my knowledge, not possible to reproduce by monitors,
whereas the 'greyish red' (color chart of RHS) of the typus is very
easy. The data for the typus are: Hue=356°, Saturation=90%, Brightness=
64%. All other examples have Saturation=100%.
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