Mary Gartside (c. 1755-1819) was an Englishwater colourist and colour theorist. She published three books between 1805 and 1808. In chronological and intellectual terms Mary Gartside can be regarded an exemplary link between Moses Harris, who published his short but important Natural System of Colours around 1766, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s highly influential theory Zur Farbenlehre, first published in 1810.[1] Gartside's colour theory was published privately under the disguise of a traditional water colouring manual. She is the first recorded woman known to have published a theory of colour.[2]
Biography
Gartside was very probably born in 1755 and brought up in Manchester, but few details are known.[3]
Gartside exhibited some of her own art work, paintings of flowers in watercolour, at the Royal Academy in 1781, at the Botanic Gardens in Liverpool in 1784, and at the Associated Artists in Water-Color in London in 1808. Mary Gartside died near Ludlow on 9 December 1819, aged 64.[4]
Published works
An Essay on Light and Shade, on Colours, and on Composition in General - her "Violet" blot
Between 1805 and 1808 Mary Gartside published three books on painting in watercolour that reflect her interest in colour theory and its applicability. She published An Essay on Light and Shade, privately in 1805.[5]
She wrote Ornamental Groups, Descriptive of Flowers, Birds, Shells, Fruit, Insects etc,. published by William Miller in 1808; and the second, enlarged edition of her first book with the new title An Essay on a New Theory of Colour, published by Gardiner, Miller and Arch in 1808.[6] It is clear that she had some education and in the book she mentions Samuel Tertius Galton's 1799 work “Experiments on Colours”, and the entomologist Moses Harris's “System of Colours”.[7] She writes that readers "will see the whole range of pure and compound colours, and the contrasting tints to each, at one view".[3]New Theory of Colour was intended as the first of a three-volume set, but volumes 2 and 3 never appeared. A 10-page pamphlet appears to have preceded An Essay on Light and Shade, and is titled An Essay on Light and Shadow. It does not contain the hand-coloured blots included in the later editions. Because each copy had to be individually painted it meant that every book was unique. One of the copies was for her patron Thomas Barrow and his copy was offered at auction in 2023.[8]
Mary Gartside completed two drawings that were published in the third volume of Dru Drury's book Illustrations of Natural History.[9]
Review and commentary
One of the first scholars to have referenced and discussed her was Frederic Schmid in his book The Practice of Painting (London: Faber and Faber, 1948) and a related essay. Her work has recently been discussed by scholars such as Ian C. Bristow,[10] Ann Bermingham,[11] Martin Kemp,[12] Jean-Jacques Rosat [13] and Raphael Rosenberg.[14]
In 2013, a copy of An Essay on Light and Shade, on Colours, and on Composition in General was included in the exhibition Regency Colour and Beyond, 1785-1850 at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton.[15][16] Mary Gartside was the focus of a research project, led by Alexandra Loske at the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research at the University of Sussex about women in colour history.[17][18] In January 2024, a monograph on Gartside, with focus on the so-called "Barrow copy" of her Essay on Light and Shade was published, Mary Gartside, c.1755-1819: Abstract Visions of Colour.[19]
Selected works
An Essay on Light and Shade, on Colours, and on Composition in General (London, 1805)
An Essay on a New Theory of Colours, and on Composition in General (London, 1808)
Ornamental Groups, Descriptive of Flowers, Birds, Shells, Fruit, Insects, &c., and Illustrative of a New Theory of Colouring (London, W. Miller, 1808)
^Anderson, Wendy; Biggam, C. P.; Hough, Carole; Kay, Christian, eds. (2014). Colour studies: a broad spectrum ; [based on papers and posters presented at the "Progress in Colour Studies 2012" conference (PICS12), held at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, from 10 to 13 July 2012]. Amsterdam: Benjamins. ISBN978-90-272-6919-5.
^Bristow, Ian C., Architectural Colour in British Interiors 1615-1840 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996)
^Bermingham, Ann, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven, CT: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art/Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 215-227.
^Kemp, Martin, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven and London: Yale, 1990)
^Rosat,J. "Goethe’s Theory of Colours. Somewhere between science, art and philosophy" The Letter of the Collège de France (Letter 17), 25 November 2005
^Rosenberg, R., and Max Hollein, Turner – Hugo – Moreau. Entdeckung der Abstraktion (Munich, Hirmer Verlag, 2006)
