Painters with blue-yellow colorblindness who created distinctive palettes. Their canvases reveal what their world looked like. A natural experiment in alternative color spaces.
Shinobu Ishihara, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
A different kind of rainbow
Human color vision depends on three types of photoreceptor cells in the retina known as cones. These S-, M-, and L-cones are each sensitive to different wavelengths of light—short (blue), medium (green), and long (red), respectively. The brain interprets the relative signals from these three cone types to perceive a spectrum of up to one million colors. Tritanopia is a form of color vision deficiency where the short-wavelength S-cones are missing or non-functional. This eliminates the ability to perceive the blue-yellow spectrum.
This condition is rare, affecting fewer than 1 in 10,000 people. Unlike the more common red-green color blindness, which is an X-linked recessive trait affecting more men, tritanopia is an autosomal condition. It results from a mutation on chromosome 7, meaning it affects males and females at equal rates. People with tritanopia have dichromatic vision; their world is painted with reds, greens, and greys. They typically confuse blue with green, yellow with violet, and yellow with pink. While congenital tritanopia is a stable, lifelong condition, an acquired form can result from head trauma, alcoholism, or age-related changes to the eye's lens.
The artist's eye
The diagnosis of historical figures is speculative, but some art historians and ophthalmologists suggest certain artists may have had a form of color vision deficiency. The 19th-century French artist Charles Meryon is a notable example. Born in 1821, Meryon initially pursued a career as a painter. He soon realized he had a color vision defect and abandoned painting in favor of etching, a medium that depends on line and contrast rather than color. Meryon's etchings, especially his famous series of Parisian cityscapes from 1850 to 1854, are known for their dramatic use of light and shadow, conveying a moody and gothic vision of the city. His one known oil painting, "Ghost Ship," shows a preference for blues and yellows, which some researchers suggest is typical for artists with this specific color vision defect trying to work with colors they perceive differently. His personal struggles were immense; he suffered from mental illness and died in an asylum in 1868.
The work of artists with any form of color vision deficiency shows alternative sensory worlds. Their canvases are not "wrong"; they are accurate representations of their distinct perceptual reality. For these artists, a limited palette is not a limitation but a different set of rules, forcing a reliance on tone and composition to convey emotion and form.
💡Fun Facts
The most common form of color blindness, red-green deficiency, affects about 1 in 12 men of Northern European descent but only 1 in 200 women.
The standard clinical test for color blindness is the Ishihara test, invented in 1917, which uses a series of plates containing colored dots that form numbers.
Some animals see colors humans cannot. Many birds, insects, and fish have four types of cones, allowing them to perceive ultraviolet (UV) light.
It is estimated that up to 12 percent of women have four types of cones instead of three, a condition called tetrachromacy, giving them the potential to see 100 times more colors than the average person.
