Two hundred and fifty years before Pantone started publishing its authoritative guide to the colors of the world, a little known Dutch artist did it first.In 1692, A. Boogert wrote and colored a 898-page volume of 800 different colors, entirely by hand. His Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau (treaty about colors for water painting) attempted to catalog all the different shades that could be achieved with different proportions of water to pigment…..

Source: Centuries before Pantone, a 17th century book tried to list every existing watercolor — Quartz