3.     In his most brilliantly innovative of his Nocturnes, currently hung in the Detroit Institute of Arts, Whistler set down his unique impression of the light, forms and atmosphere of a passing moment in Thames-side London at night.   Of all Whistler's work, this example departs furthest from the realistic representation of nature that the public had come to expect.   When the eminent critic John Ruskin, who fervently believed in the obligation of art to uphold morality, saw Nocturne in Black and Gold on exhibition in 1877, he was outraged.   In a magazine article he criticized Whistler for flinging "a pot of paint in the public's face" and then having the audacity to charge 200 guineas for it.   Incensed at this attack by an avowed enemy of "art for art's sake", Whistler sued Ruskin for libel.   At the trial neither judge nor jury appreciated the significance of the plaintiffs statement that the painting was not a view of Cremome but merely "an artistic arrangement" born of a " lifetime of experience ".   Although the verdict was in Whistler's favour, only token damages were awarded and the judge ordered both men to split court costs. The burden of this expense, added to Whistler's other considerable debts, left him bankrupt.

Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (c.1877), Detroit Institute of Art

4.      Thomas Young, Dictionary of Ideas (Hutchinson), colour vision, pg. 105-6.

5.      Semir Zeki, "A Vision of the Brain" (Oxford, 1993)  ch. 1-5, 23-27.

6.      Luigina De Grandis, "Theory and use of Colour",  Blandford Press, pg. 103 and 130 - 1.

7.      Psychology appears to have largely separated from philosophy circa 1879, when Wundt opened the first Psychology Laboratory.   His methods were chiefly introspective and concerned with conscious experience.   Watson, Tolman and Pavlov, rejected the use of hypothetical mental processes, and emphasised observable facts, based on empirical evidence. The approach grew into behaviourism, which was extremely influential in America until the 1980s, especially with ideas of B. F. Skinner and experimentation using rats, based on the earlier work of the Russian physiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849-1936) who studied the condition reflexes of dogs.   However, sharing the same ancestry, cognitive psychology was re-born in the 1950's, influenced by various developments such as the advent of the computer.   Its protagonists were Chomsky (linguistic theories), Braudbent and Miller et al (attention and memory), whose work centred on three areas, laboratory studies of normal behaviour, investigations of brain damage subjects and computer simulations.   The Gestalt approach, which emphasised the "whole" (Gestalt) rather than the constituent parts, first appeared in Germany in the 1930s, and many of its founders subsequently fled to America before the Second World War.   The approach opposed Structuralism, Functionalism and Behaviourism.   Its most notable contributions were accounts of how sensations give rise to perceptions, particularly visual ones. Collectively these are called the laws of Prägnanz (pregnant with meaning) because its principles give meaning to all we see, when restructuring of the whole situation, often involving problem solving through insight.   When thinking about thinking, the Gestalt psychologists introduced the concept of functional fixedness (Einstellung), which blocks creative thinking. This descriptive and imprecise nature of Gestalt theory has its critics, and while the approach as such no longer exists, its influence is felt in many areas where holism is emphasised.   Cognitive psychology, in its various forms, denies that perception and behaviour are controlled by stimuli, emphasising the importance of general background knowledge and more-or-less logical thought processes.

8.      In proposing his "Personal Construct Theory", George Kelly provided a fundamental postulate, that, "A person's processes are psychologically channelized by the way in which he anticip ates events".   That is, we seek to predict, interpret, make assumptions about what reality is (constructs), and proceed to find out how useful or useless those assumptions are.   D. Bannister and Fay Fransella, "Inquiring Man, The Theory of Personal Constructs", Penguin. pg. 18-19.

9.      Richard L. Gregory, "Eye and Brain, The Psychology of seeing" Oxford University Press, pg. 162.

10.   Richard Gregory, interestingly concludes, that there is a conflict between designing experiments simple enough for analysis and sufficiently complex to reveal the full richness of perceptual phenomena: so science is an art, and like the arts, is not completely mastered.

11.   José M. Parramón, "Colour Theory", Watson Gupttill Publications NY, pg. 6

12.   and   14.    Richard Thompson, "Seurat", published by Phaidon, appendix II, pg. 225.

13.  Camille Pissarro's palette apparently contains more colours, than an HTML page allows for colouring "body text" at any one time.

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