Professor Albert H. Munsell (1858-1918) Author of A Color Notation and the Atlas of the Munsell Color System.
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Professor Albert H. Munsell
Professor Munsell was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 6th, 1858 and
died June 28th, 1918 at age 60. Author of A Color Notation
(1905) and the Atlas of the Munsell Color System (1915). Both
an artist of distinction and a gifted teacher of art, he developed
the first widely-accepted color order system to make the description
of color accurate and convenient and to aid in the teaching of color.
The Munsell color order system has gained international acceptance
and has served as the foundation for other color order systems.
Albert Munsell founded the Munsell Color Company in 1917. Later, in 1942,
the Munsell Color Foundation was formed by the company to promote the
advancement of the science of color. Ultimately, the Munsell Color
Foundation led to the founding of this laboratory, the Munsell Color
Science Laboratory, in 1983, at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Unfortunately, no good photo of Professor Munsell is available. In
1998, Munsell graduate student Doug Corbin restored the photo from
Munsell's book, A Color Notation. The details of the procedure
appeared in the February 1999 issue of Color Research and Application.
Doug has provided the following information pertaining to this restoration:
- The full text of the CR&A submission can be found
here
- Images corrected for monitor viewing can be found
here.
- The LARGE uncorrected image can be found
here (21MB TIFF file).
- The scientific diaries of Albert Munsell are available here.
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