Mary Gartside

Mary Gartside (c. 1755-1819) was an English water 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 Germany in its complete form in 1810.[1] Gartside's colour theory was published privately under the disguise of a traditional water colouring manual. Until well into the twentieth century, she remained the only woman known to have published a theory of colour. She exhibited some of her own art work, paintings of flowers in watercolour, at the Royal Academy in 1781 and at the Associated Artists in Water-Color in London in 1808. Mary Gartside died near Ludlow on 9 December 1819, aged 64.[2]

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, [3] Ann Bermingham,[4] Martin Kemp,[5] Jean-Jacques Rosat [6] and Raphael Rosenberg.[7] In 2009, Alexandra Loske presented a paper on Gartside's life and work at a research conference in Lewes, United Kingdom.

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.[8] Curator Alexandra Loske produced a blog post about this rare book on the Royal Pavilion's official blog,[9] in which all eight colour blots can be seen. A complete set of the blots has also been reproduced in Alexandra Loske's Colour: A Visual History.[10] Since 2020, Mary Gartside has been featuring in a research project, led by Alexandra Loske) at the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research (CLHLWR) at the University of Sussex about women in colour history.[11] In January 2020 this project was presented by Loske as a research paper at the University of Edinburgh.[12]