Border Spectra in the Skies of Hokusai and Hiroshige: Japanese Traces of Newton or Goethe? A Colour Mystery

In his earliest prismatic experiments (1665), the young Newton discovered the two border spectra (black-blue-turquoise/cyan-white; white-yellow-red-black). Newton chose to ignore them in his celebrated theory of light and colours (1672), as he took them to be derivative phenomena.

In Goethe’s Beyträge zur Optik (1791/2) and in his Farbenlehre (1808/10), they regained prominent attention. To the human eye, their colours appear much cleaner than the colours of Newton’s spectra – particularly in the case of yellow and turquoise. This undeniable phenomenological fact, however, has not added strength to Goethe’s attack on Newton’s theory. 

Are, then, the border spectra perhaps prominent in the art of painting? Not in European art, but they make a surprise appearance in the art of Japanese ukiyo-e. Many of Hokusai’s and Hiroshige’s prints have skies with the colour sequence black-blue-turquoise-white, arranged in parallel stripes. I find this remarkable, for it is a combination of colours that exactly matches one of the two border spectra. With such a precise geometrical arrangement, it occurs only in quite specific prismatic experiments and not outside the lab. At that time, Japan was isolated from European influences. Were the border spectra discovered for a second time? That is one of the questions I want to raise in my paper. I will end the paper with a few remarks on the aesthetic effects of those colours in ukiyo-e woodblock prints.

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