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Ditto. A LOT of artistic license was taken in choosing colors for those ads. Unfortunately, this has translated into many clown-like restored cars. It is known that many "show cars" were painted wildly to attract attention, but most of them had to be repainted in order to sell them.

You'll also find examples of such artistic license employed in an occasional ad of later years - like a black/orange/black paint job on a '56 Caribbean convertible and a dark-blue/white/black three-tone on another. Mind you, I'm not saying that there weren't deviations from the four standard three-tones offered on those cars. In fact, IIRC, one '56 Carib was actually painted by the factory in all-white, and Randy Berger's was done by the factory in black/white/black. However, I never saw a factory-produced example of the two shown in those ads.

Yet, the use of artistic license even extends to the manufacturer's showroom literature. For example, there's a hardtop show in the '56 Executive brochure that's rendered in a green/white two-tone, but with a shade of green that was never offered. I wouldn't call it attractive, but it did catch my eye.

However, Packard was not alone on this. Showroom pieces I found to help document and detail a 1950 Pontiac survivor showed the "Silver Streak 8" engine in an incorrect color - a golden shade, when the factory painted them a dark green. Because the cylinder head had been replaced and the engine repainted red at some point in its previous life, it took careful cleaning and inspection of the block for the owner to feel confident about using the dark green.

Except for a few years, we have some supplier paint chip sets here at P'Info dating back to 1947 (one for 1941), but hopefully that will continue to grow. Meanwhile, autocolorlibrary.com has scans of paint book pages for Packard back to 1929, but it seems like the older ones have no chips - just text.

In those days weren't a lot of Packards equipped with custom bodies? And even in the case of a factory body couldn't a customer order one painted and trimmed to his or her taste?

The catalog and advertising illustrations must have been approved by the management or they would not have been published. I doubt many cars were actually produced in such loud color schemes but it was at least possible and no doubt some cars were sold that way.

Anyone who has only seen black and white photos might find them startling but in fact, bright colors were more common than you might think especially on roadsters and coupes and on cars sold in the west.