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Samuel Masters for Art-Sheep

A lot of people are familiar with the Pantone Color Guide, published for the first time in 1963 and containing a great variety of different color shades. However, very few are aware of the existence of a very similar book written in Dutch by a man simply known as “A. Boogert”, created 271 years before its modern counterpart, in 1692.

The Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau, was, according to historian Erik Kwakkel specializing in Medieval books, one of the most elaborate educational guides on color mixing and creating hues, comprised of nearly 800 hand-painted and handwritten pages. The one and only existing (and-surprisingly-ever made, for that matter) copy of the book can be found in the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix-en-Provence, France.

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