ABSTRACT
David Ramsay Hay was a Scottish artist, interior decorator, and colour theorist. In April 1820, he worked for Walter Scott on the decorations at Abbotsford, and in 1850, he decorated Holyroodhouse for Queen Victoria, and then in the 1850s, he designed interiors for the National Gallery of Scotland. Hay also developed rules of visual beauty based on Greek theories of musical harmonies, which divided up forms in the same proportions and partitions found in these sounds. In relation to form, Hay suggested that ‘Forms are therefore analogous to sounds and colours in their effects upon the senses, and through the senses upon the mind. Hay considered that harmony was found in the proportion and arrangement of the elements of abstract form that led to the ‘geometric poetry of the graphic art’. Mr Hay’s theory is somewhat like this; but practically developed for the painter, the sculptor, and the architect’.
