1. A box of colors, a portable box for holding artists’ colors, brushes, etc., a paint-box.
Mod. The Society of Arts’ shilling colour-box.
2. Calico-printing. The box that supplies color to the printing rollers.
1858–75. Ure, Dict. Arts, I. 604. Sometimes for the highest rollers, and especially in machines of more than four colours, the cumbrous colour box is dispensed with, and a doctor inserted in a curved frame is applied to the roller instead. Ibid., I. 607. The machine printer … attends to supplying the colour boxes with colour.
3. An instrument devised by Clerk Maxwell for compounding the colors of the spectrum in any required proportion.
1870. C. Maxwell, Lett., 6 July, in Life (1882), 346. I made a great colour-box in 1862, and worked it in London in 1862. Ibid. (1882), 475. His colour-box demands a special notice.
