Bird Identification Colour Charts

A collection of colour charts was produced as part of the Bird Skins exhibition, inspired by the natural sciences’ collection at New Walk Museum in Leicester. Each colour chart was created by selecting the colour direct from a high quality photograph of each bird to get a true colour match.

Lucy was inspired by Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, an early colour dictionary, outlining colour matches across the natural kingdoms. Darwin referred to it in his notebooks from the voyage of The Beagle. One of the most significant colour dictionaries’, A Nomenclature of Colours for Naturalists (1886), was developed by Robert Ridgeway, an American ornithologist for bird identification, which was developed in 1912 naming 1,115 colours, paving the way for the Pantone colour charts of today.