Field's Chromatic Equivalents.
So much has been said and written about Field's Equivalents that there is a very general impression among artists and others that they constitute an important element in harmonious compositions of color. This proposition as given in Owen Jones' Grammar of Ornament is as follows:—
"The primaries of equal intensities will harmonize or neutralize each other, in the proportions of 3 yellow, 5 red and 8 blue—integrally as 16.
The secondaries in the proportions of 8 orange, 13 purple, 11 green—integrally as 32.
The tertiaries, citrine (compound of orange and green), 19; russet (orange and purple), 21; olive (green and purple), 24—integrally as 64."
In commenting on this in "The Theory of Color" Dr. Von Bezold says: "It is often maintained that the individual colors in a colored ornament should be so chosen, both as regards hues and the areas assigned to them, that the resulting mixture, as well as the total impression produced when such ornaments are looked at from a considerable distance, should be a neutral gray. Starting from this idea, the attempt has been made to fix the proportional size of the areas, which would have to be assigned to the various colors usually employed in the arts, for the purpose of arriving at the result indicated. This idea was especially elaborated by Field, an Englishman, who gave the name of 'chromatic equivalents' to the numbers of the proportions obtained, a designation which has since been very generally adopted. In reality, however, these 'chromatic equivalents' have no value whatever."
The same writer also says: "It will always remain incomprehensible that even a man like Owen Jones in the text accompanying his beautiful "Grammar of Ornament" should have adopted this proposition in the form given to it by Field, since among all the ornaments reproduced in the work just mentioned there are scarcely any which will really show the distribution of colors demanded by the proposition in question." [B]
In accordance with this eminent authority any one familiar with disk combinations will know by experiment that no combinations of red, yellow and blue approaching the proportion named by Field can produce a neutral gray effect in the eye.