Some 100 years before Albert Munsell developed his color order system, French silk merchant and inventor of a technology for producing works of art in silk velours, Gaspard Gregoire, introduced a color order system based on the color attributes hue, (relative) chroma, and lightness. Conceived in the mid-1780s, an atlas with 1350 samples was produced before 1813 and found use in French Royal manufacturing operations and educational institutions. It was followed a few years later by one with 343 samples. Gregoire's work was subsequently overshadowed by Michel-Eugene Chevreul's more complicated and less intuitive hemispherical system of 1839. (c) 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.