August 20, 2012 11:32 am
Was Vincent van Gogh Color Blind? It Sure Looks Like It
Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (left) filtered to simulate color blindness (right). Photo: Kazunori Asada
Around a tenth of all men are color blind or color deficient, and as Joe Hanson discusses on It’s Okay to Be Smart, famed painter Vincent van Gogh may have been counted among them.
Hanson references the work of Kazunori Asada, a researcher and designer who is concerned with color vision. Asada had seen some of van Gogh’s work in what he calls a color vision experience room – one where the lighting conditions are meant to simulate color blindness.
Under the filtered light, I found that these paintings looked different from the van Gogh which I had always seen. I love van Gogh’s paintings and have been fortunate to view a number of the originals in various art museums. This painter has a somewhat strange way to use color. Although the use of color is rich, lines of different colors run concurrently, or a point of different color suddenly appears. I’ve heard it conjectured that van Gogh had color vision deficiency.
However, in the van Gogh images seen in the color vision experience room, to me the incongruity of color and roughness of line had quietly disappeared. And each picture had changed into one of brilliance with very delicate lines and shades. This was truly wonderful experience.
To recreate his experience, Asada modified a color-deficiency simulator he had previously designed to better mimic more subtle variations of color blindness. He has a number of striking examples of the master painter’s works reimagined. The simulator is freely available, and allows you to simulate the experiences of the one-in-ten men (and fewer women) you may know with some form of color vision deficiency.
Here, Hanson filtered the watercolor art of Michele Banks through Asada’s tool to show normal vision, red-green color blindness (known as protanopia, top right), blue-yellow color blindness (tritanopia, bottom right), and red-green-yollow color blindness (deuteranopia, bottom left.)
Cell division watercolor, filtered through Asada’s color-deficiency simulator. Painting: Michele Banks, Photo: Joe Hanson
When turned on the natural world, the varying forms of color deficiency produce striking results.
Clockwise from top left: normal vision, protonopia, tritanopia, and deuteranopia. Photo: Colin Schultz
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Does it mean anything that the P and D photos look the exact same to me? Or should they look the same?
Comment by Reta Murphy — August 20, 2012 @ 1:02 pm
The P and D photos look the same to me, too, and as far as I know I have perfect colour vision.
Comment by Colin Schultz — August 20, 2012 @ 1:28 pm
Ummm, they are all different! My mother has always thought she has a rare ‘colour difference’. She can’t tell blue from green, or pink from orange – so she will miss, for instance, a bank of bluebells which look the same colour as the grass. Looking at this I wonder if she actually has what you call deuteranopia? We’d be very interested to know. She can sail through colour blindness charts at the optician, but she definitely does see things quite differently. She tells me that the painter, Constable, saw the world just as she does because his paintings look like exact representations of it, while as to most people, I think, they are a bit dark. Her parents were first cousins, so it is possible she has a very rare form of colour blindness.
Comment by Pippa — August 20, 2012 @ 2:03 pm
of possible interest:-
“Van Gogh’s yellow palette.” 20.7 minutes with narration
http://cas.umkc.edu/Chemistry/kcacs/Van%20Gogh%27s%20Yellow%20Palette/index.html
Comment by Dr. Wilfred Arnold — August 20, 2012 @ 11:05 pm
How about digoxin overdose derived from foxglove which is also the pigment used to provide the violet and puplish blues in his paintings. It causes vision changes
Comment by Medic1532 — August 22, 2012 @ 10:12 am
The top right and bottom left of both the cell divisions and the birds look the same to me…is that on purpose or am I colorblind in some way?
I am a painter as well so I suppose it would be a good idea to know.
Comment by Daniel Fleming — August 22, 2012 @ 11:45 am
Funny that we could rave about Van Gogh’s use of color only to learn that maybe we don’t see what he actually intended.
On another note, the P and D panels look pretty similar to me as well. Maybe the yellows in the D panel are a little less saturated but that’s about the only difference that I can tell.
Comment by DanielP — August 22, 2012 @ 12:10 pm
I’m red-green blind, and c, p, and d all look the same to me. It’s neat to know that I’ve always seen “Starry Night” the way it’s intended to look lol
Comment by Chad r — August 22, 2012 @ 2:30 pm
It would be far more useful to provide the images as a downloadable packet, due to the limitations of color on the web.
Comment by Heidi — August 26, 2012 @ 9:31 pm
HI, I’m Joe, referenced by Colin from the original post.
Many people have pointed out that the P and D panels of the color simulations look almost the same, if not identical. Protanopia and deuteranopia, while affecting different photoreceptor types, actually produce similar effects. Although the “red” photoreceptor is called “red”, the wavelengths that it recognizes overlap quite a bit with the “green”. You can see this here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1e/Cones_SMJ2_E.svg/240px-Cones_SMJ2_E.svg.png
So having colorblindness affecting either of those, while different in name, is a similar color deficiency.
Comment by Joe Hanson — August 27, 2012 @ 10:52 am
There is no proof that Van Gogh was colorblind. This is just someone’s hypothesis. No actual proof has been presented here.
Comment by Joyce — September 25, 2012 @ 6:12 pm
It seems like this theory about color blindness comes from someone who has not researched a thing about Van Gogh–like reading what the artist said about his works or understanding the contemporary theories that surrounded art in the late 19th century.
In this case, does this “researcher” know what every first-year art history student does: that Van Gogh was interested in contemporary color theories of simultaneous contrast?
Van Gogh was not interested in painting an exact reality–but exploring the powers inherent in color and especially in unusual contrasts. So yes, his colors may *not* look like the “real world,” but they clearly reflect the color theories he wrote about frequently.
We are lucky enough to have 15 years worth of Van Gogh’s prolific letters, all of which are available on the web. Van Gogh wrote over and over about his interest in these widely-circulated theories of color–particularly Charles Blanc, who wrote about how colors are strengthened when placed directly next to their opposite on the color circle: http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let536/letter.html
On Blanc: http://www.colorsystem.com/?page_id=834&lang=en
Frustrated to see such an odd, unsupported, under-researched theory highlighted by the Smithsonian!
Comment by Amy — September 28, 2012 @ 1:46 pm
First Kazunori Asada has repeatedly stated he is not making a conclusion merely an observation. And the claims about van Gogh’s color usage sounds like puffery to sell a painting that isn’t representational. IOW “Oh, I meant to do that”.
Comment by Billy — October 12, 2012 @ 11:11 am
I have been told I have some color deficiency because the common charts with numbers on them are not clear to me. The colors are there to the point I see them plainly but not in the distinct pattern forming clear numbers. I see almost the entire spectrum of colors and light, only dark blue and black can be a hard pick in certain light conditions, but I maintain everyone has that same difficulty under those conditions.
When I made color wheel charts in school for a fine art class they were good. I don’t get it and it annoys me when someone discounts me for being color blind in a patronizing fashion when I CAN see ALL THE COLORS THEY CLAIM I CAN NOT! even your dramatizations of examples are plain to me as different, frame by frame.
My main irritation is with opportunities denied me because of an archaic and flawed system having labeled me as “color blind.” But as I am 58 now I don’t care.
Comment by Bruce A Comeau — May 17, 2013 @ 3:08 pm