Michel-Eugène Chevreul

Michel-Eugène Chevreul (born Aug. 31, 1786, Angers, France—died April 9, 1889, Paris) was a French chemist who elucidated the chemical composition of animal fats and whose theories of colour influenced the techniques of French painting.

Background and education

Chevreul belonged to a family of surgeons. After receiving a private education during the French Revolution, in 1799 Chevreul entered a new scientific school in Angers. In 1803 he left for Paris, intending to become a chemist. Nicolas Vauquelin, professor of chemistry at the Museum of Natural History, accepted him as his assistant. Vauquelin wanted to isolate substances from animal and plant materials, and under his direction between 1807 and 1811 Chevreul isolated several coloured substances from woods, three of which (brazilin, hematoxylin, and quercetin) became commercial dye ingredients. His discoveries of animal substances included creatine (a substance synthesized mainly in the liver from various amino acids and stored in muscles to provide energy) and cholesterol.

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Chemistry of fats

During his extraordinarily long life, Chevreul saw organic chemistry develop from a rudimentary state to a well-organized science. He made two major contributions to this development. In 1811 his analysis of a soap made from pig fat led to a 12-year study of a variety of animal fats. Chemists believed that a soap was the product of the entire fat reacting with an alkali. However, Chevreul proved that an alkali split a fat into an alcohol, which he named glycerin (see glycerol), and a soap, which was the salt of an organic acid. Thus, fats were glycerides of organic acids. He isolated many such acids, and a new series of organic substances entered the chemical literature—the fatty acids, bearing Chevreul’s names, such as oleic acid and stearic acid. In 1823 he published a classic of chemistry, Recherches chimiques sur les corps gras d’origine animale (“Chemical Research on Animal Fats”), which described how he unraveled the nature of this biologically important class of organic compounds.

Because of the complexity of animal and plant materials, organic analysis had remained underdeveloped. A coherent system of methods of extraction and purification was needed to obtain pure chemical species from the complex mixtures found in nature. Chevreul accomplished this with his research on fats, showing their constituents to be well-defined chemical compounds. His organic analysis placed the methods of extraction, isolation, and purification on a sound basis. For his achievements, he was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1826. He succeeded Vauquelin as professor of chemistry at the Museum in 1830.

Chevreul’s research led to improvements and greater uniformity of product in the soap industry and to a new kind of candle. In 1825 he obtained a patent for the preparation of stearic acid candles from fat. Chevreul’s candles, unlike the widely used tallow candles, were hard, odourless, and gave a brilliant light. Commercial stearin candles appeared in Paris in the 1830s, and they quickly became the most popular candle in France.

The contrast of colours

After 1824 Chevreul’s career took a new direction. Soon after his appointment that year as director of dyeing at the tapestry works in Gobelin, he received complaints about the lack of vigour in tapestry colours. He found that the problem was not chemical in nature but optical. His lengthy investigation into the optical mixing of colours led to his finding several types of contrast of colour and tone and a formulation of the law of simultaneous contrast: colours mutually influence one another when juxtaposed, each imposing its own complementary colour on the other.

The fruit of his colour studies was De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs (1839; The Laws of Contrast of Colour), his most influential book. He provided many examples of how juxtaposed colours can enhance or diminish each other’s intensity, and he described many ways to produce desired colour effects, such as with massed monochromatic dots. To represent colours by definite standards, he brought together all of the colours of the visible spectrum, relating them to each other in a circular system, and he also produced scales of thousands of tints. He applied his findings to Gobelin tapestries and textiles, wallpaper, horticulture, mapmaking, colour printing, mosaics, and painting. Indeed, he “wrote the book” for artists, designers, and decorators. His book, with its English and German translations, became the most widely used colour manual of the 19th century.

Chevreul and the French painter Eugène Delacroix were major influences in the development of Impressionism. Delacroix experimented with broken tones, seeking to obtain vibrant and luminous colours. Inspired by Chevreul’s 1839 treatise, he took copious notes and passed his enthusiasm on to young artists. The Impressionists, in their search for ways to make light and colour appear more brilliant, found valuable Chevreul’s advice that they should apply separate brushstrokes of pure colour to a canvas and allow the viewer’s eye to combine them optically. In the 1880s, the French Postimpressionist painters Georges Seurat and Paul Signac went further. They united Chevreul’s colour schemes with painters’ practices as closely as possible, developing the pointillist technique of applying a multitude of tints and tones in the form of dots to their canvases. In 1884 they visited Chevreul to pay homage to the man they regarded as the founder of French colourism.

His later years

Chevreul married Sophie Davallet, the daughter of a government official, in 1818. After her death in 1862, he resided in the Museum of Natural History. Chevreul continued his scholarly endeavours into the 1880s, his last publication appearing in 1888. He produced a treatise debunking psychic phenomena in 1854 and a psychological study of the changes associated with old age in 1875. Books on the history and philosophy of science appeared in 1860, 1866, and 1878. His centenary in 1886 was a national event conducted in the presence of more than 2,000 international delegates from societies, schools, and museums. For his centenary, the French government published a beautiful edition of his colour book and erected a full-length statue of him in the gardens of the Museum. As his health declined in 1889, his only child, Henri, came to be with him. However, Chevreul suffered the death of his son 13 days before his own.