A. H. Munsell

Albert Henry Munsell (1858–1918) was an American painter and teacher who devised the Munsell color system. Born in Boston, he studied and later taught at the Massachusetts Normal Art School, and exhibited as a portrait and marine painter. Dissatisfied with vague color names, he developed a way of describing any color by three measured qualities, hue, value and chroma, set out in A Color Notation in 1905 and in his Atlas of the Munsell Color System. He invented instruments for measuring color, and his system is still used in art, industry, soil science and design.