Colors can really evoke the atmosphere of an era. For example, orange, brown, yellow and olive green bring me back to my youth in the 1970's. Some pastel colors remind me of the fifties (Happy Days!!).
Goin further back in time it becomes harder and harder to find the characteristic colors. Simply because there weren't that much much color prints back then. The first technology for color printing was chromolithography, which was invented around 1890. Advances in that technology came in 1910. And this is also when the first colored advertising appeared in the magazines!
Research and restoration
I searched the internet for some of those early advertisements. I found a couple of them, which seemed to belong together. The were giving me a good idea of the fashionable colors from that time for home decoration.
The pictures I found were scans of prints on yellowed paper. I suspected the yellowing had also affected the original colors. So I decided to do some restoration.
After restoration and filtering out the yellowing, the colors looked so much fresher! You can see the differences in the animation.
Putting it all together
Comparing the advertisements I found, I noticed that the colors were not printed really exact. There were visible differences. So I decided to restore all of them and sort out and "average" the colors to get a more realistic impression on the originals.
I've given you the restored advertisements below; feel free to re-use them! The averaged and sorted colors are in the picture heading this blog. It really shows the preferences of that time for certain colors:
- Many pinks and violets
- Bright yellows and oranges, and darker browns
- Subdued gray-greens and sand colors
- Some light blue and bluish greens
Visit my website with the original article (in Dutch and with FREE download of images and MacOS color palet.
The restored color schemes for house decoration
These are the restored advertisements I found on the internet. I can't tell where the came from originally, but I found them through Pinterest and Google. The all seemed to come from a website called "antiquehome.org". I guess they scanned them from a magazine.
