ABSTRACT
Michel-Eugène Chevreul's name crops up briefly in accounts of Charles Baudelaire's aesthetics, particularly in connection with the Salon de 1846 Baudelaire himself never mentions Chevreul, but then neither does Eugène Delacroix. Chevreul's formulation of the 'law of contrasts' in colour theory differed subtly but crucially from previous formulations and subsequently became merged into a general body of knowledge about colour behaviour, until it was subsumed and lost from sight within the comprehensive theories elaborated by Helmholtz and Rood. This chapter provides some account of Chevreul's optical theories but also of his aesthetic views and his embryonic ideas on perceptual psychology, because these are all part of the general context in which Baudelaire came to formulate his own aesthetics. Chevreul's law states that juxtaposed or simultaneously perceived colours modify each other mutually in a way which maximizes the difference between them and tends to recreate the conditions for the production of white light.
