900-Page Pre-Pantone Guide to Color from 1692 (With Complete High-Res Scan)

Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau (original Dutch title Klaer Lightende Spiegel der Verfkonst) is a 1692, 900‑page, handwritten manual on watercolor painting compiled and illustrated by A. Boogert as a single, unique copy. More than 700 pages consist of meticulous color swatches and recipes showing how to mix pigments and alter tones by adding “one, two or three portions of water,” with explanatory text in Dutch and a French title aimed at watercolourists. The manual follows an Aristotelian approach to color rather than the spectral theory later articulated by Isaac Newton in Opticks (1704), and it functions as both a practical workshop guide and an exhaustive visual catalogue of hues and gradations.

The work anticipates modern color chips and standardization decades and centuries before Pantone (founded 1963) and follows antecedents like Goethe’s 1810 Theory of Colours and Werner’s 1814 Nomenclature of Colours - but its impact was minimal because only a single copy was produced and not widely distributed. The volume is preserved at Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix‑en‑Provence and has been digitized in high‑resolution, zoomable scans, offering an extraordinary, page‑by‑page window into 17th‑century pigment mixing, watercolor technique, and the pre‑Newtonian visual ordering of color.