According to Dackerman, twentieth-century art historians and collectors denigrated color, seeing it as nothing more than a way to hide the flaws of poorly-executed engravings and woodcuts. Well-executed prints, they argued, needed no color at all. This disdain for colored prints helped to obscure their place in art history. This line of argument harkened back to the debates that emerged during the Italian Renaissance over whether design or color were most important (disegno/colore).

In many of these images, the paint seems hastily applied. This haphazard coloring was often a result of the artist having many prints to paint rather than a lack of skill. Artists applied paint freehand, using a brush, but they sometimes employed stencils made from extra impressions of the images in order to paint more quickly.

Many works were colored not by professionals, but by readers. A lot of the examples we have found of hand-colored illustrations come from botanical works and herbals. For example, a copy of John Gerard’s Herball (1636), with selective images colored in, suggests it was the reader who painted it, perhaps as a way to record plants he or she had seen in person. Botany and painting were favored pursuits of genteel men and women in this period, so it’s not surprising that the same people would share both hobbies.

While publishers may have informally expected these monochrome images to be colored by some readers, it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that the practice was formalised in the first purpose-made coloring books. And in these the link between botany and painting persisted. Robert Sayer’s The Florist, published in London in 1760, was one of the first books where the author explicitly intended readers to color in the images. Comprised of pictures of various flowers, the author gives his (presumably) adult readers detailed instructions for paint mixing and color choice (including the delightful sounding “gall-stone brown”).