Emily Noyes Vanderpoel

Emily Caroline Noyes was born in New York City on June 21, 1842, into a prestigious American family; a great-grandfather ran George Washington's spy ring, and a great-great-grandfather was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. She spent her winters in the city and her summers in Litchfield, Connecticut, a hill town she loved and would paint for the rest of her long life — a life she'd spend, in large part, teaching other people to see.

In May of 1865 she married John Aaron Vanderpoel. Less than a year later he was dead, and that June she gave birth to their son without him. She was twenty-three, and she never remarried.

What she did instead was work. She studied painting with R. Swain Gifford and William Sartain, and joined the New York Water Color Club — a group formed in part because the older, more established American Watercolor Society had little room for women.

In 1902 she published Color Problems: A Practical Manual for the Lay Student of Color. It wasn't written only for painters; she had "larger classes of people who are artists in other occupations" in mind. Early in the book, she asserts that color is to light as music is to sound, and that its harmonies deserved the same careful study as music's:

"Hence we may aptly term color the music of light; and when we think of the wonderful ways in which it has been used and combined by painters and designers for hundreds of years, it must seem strange to us that its harmonies have not been as thoroughly studied and classified as those of sound."

The first half of the book is a brisk tour of the color science of the day — Newton, Goethe, Chevreul, Maxwell's spinning disks — delivered with an attitude that said: Here are the facts. Keep up.

It is also, in places, gloriously opinionated. She reports that color-blindness can be brought on by too much tobacco and alcohol. She notes that one particular shade of purple reliably gave a certain young woman goose-flesh. She confidently relays the theory that the Impressionists painted the way they did because their eyesight had been disordered by hysteria.

But the words were never meant to carry the book. "Color cannot be fully appreciated by any written description," she explained, so she kept the text "as brief as possible, the plates full and elaborate." There are 117 of those plates, and they do the real talking. Fifty-four are her Color Analyses, and nothing quite like them had been done before — though a century earlier, another woman, Mary Gartside, had slipped equally strange and modern color studies into a manual for amateurs.

The method went something like this: look at an object through a small window cut in a card so that the color comes loose from the shape. Note how much of each color there is, and what sits next to what. Then paint it all into a grid of ten squares by ten.

Her complete explanation runs two sentences: "Plate LXXXIV is a drawing of the antique rug from which Plate LXXXV is reduced. By comparison the student will see how these and the other plates have been made." She did promise to keep it brief.

Plate LXXXIV from the book Color Problems, showing a painting of a dark blue rug with red accents  Plate LXXXV from the book Color Problems, showing a dark blue and red color analysis grid of an antique rug

Her subjects ranged across the whole of human ornament: Assyrian tiles, a Greek vase, a panel of the Taj Mahal, Celtic knotwork, Japanese silk brocade, and no fewer than seven mummy cloths. They also came a good deal closer to home: a teacup and saucer, a book advertisement, and a prize-winning dinner table from a flower show at Madison Square Garden.

Home, for Vanderpoel, was two very different places. A few years after the book came out she moved to a townhouse on Gramercy Park, and photographs of it survive. The downstairs parlor is exactly what you'd expect of a respectable widow: tasteful, correct, a little stiff. Her fourth-floor studio is something else entirely. There she posed in a full-length Chinese silk robe, standing on a bearskin rug beside a mantelpiece held up by a carved stone elephant's trunk. The walls were set with panels of encrusted shells, and the great square skylight overhead was draped in fishing net, straining the Manhattan sun.

The grids may have been born in that upstairs world, but downstairs is where she sent them. She never presented them as art; they were tools, handed over to "decorators, designers, lithographers, florists, dressmakers, and milliners; women in their dress and home decoration, and many others."

She meant them as lessons. Time turned them into something more, and they're far too lovely to leave in a textbook.

Amber glass candle jar with a black lid and a label showing a ten-by-ten grid of gray-green squares with vertical bands of golden yellow and brick red, titled Color Analysis from an Antique Rug.Amber glass candle jar with a black lid and a label showing a ten-by-ten grid with a camel-brown border around columns of sage green, pale blue, and yellow, titled Color Analysis from an Antique Rug.Amber glass candle jar with a black lid and a label showing a ten-by-ten grid of ochre, gray-green, dark red, and black squares, titled Color Analysis from a Mummy Cloth.Amber glass candle jar with a black lid and a label showing a ten-by-ten grid of violet, golden yellow, cream, and olive green squares, titled Color Analysis from Moorish Tiles.Amber glass candle jar with a black lid and a label showing a ten-by-ten grid of deep red squares surrounding a block of slate blue and a pale cream section, titled Color Analysis from an Antique Rug.