The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours, and their Applications to the Arts Including Painting, Interior Decoration, Tapestries, Carpets, Mosaics, Coloured Glazing, Paper-Staining, Calico-Printing, Letterpress Printing, Map Colouring, Dress, Landscape and Flower Gardening, Etc.

Chemist Michel-Eugene Chevreul was the director of dyes at the national Gobelins textile factory in Paris. Chevreul is best known for his identification of a fundamental law of the simultaneous contrast of colors, which detailed the effects that proximity between two colors has on what the eye sees. When the authors would assort the colour of a stuff with that of a wood for furniture, they must distinguish two conditions; that where they would obtain the greatest possible advantage from two colours by each giving value to the other; and that where, considering the stuff and the wood as one object, they regard only the colour of the stuff relatively to that of the objects which, with the chair, compose the furniture. It is evident, then, that, in the first instance, they must have between the two parts of the chair the stuff and the wood-harmony of contrast; and in the second, harmony of analogy.