AbstractThe Villalobos Colour Atlas with its 7273 samples, published in 1947 in Argentina, represents one of the most ambitious attempts at a systematic object color sample collection. Its authors saw it as a practical visual color measuring and specification instrument at a time when spectrophotometers were a rarity in research institutes. In part, its organization is similar to that of the Munsell system but differs in regard to saturation. After a brief description of the structure of the Atlas data, what may be the first extensive measurement data of samples of the Atlas is presented in the CIELAB system. The results, unsurprisingly, show that the Atlas (as represented by the over‐60‐year‐old copy) meets some of its stated goals only to a limited extent. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 31, 109–116, 2006; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/col.20188