chromatic icons 4: Mary Gartside

A couple of weeks ago in this series, we looked at how Patrick Syme, a man who made his living teaching flower painting to young women, went on transform the way that colour was understood with his publication of Werner’s Nomenclature. Today’s chromatic icon bears many similarities to Syme: like him, she worked in the early nineteenth century, and like him she was a talented, practising artist, whose preferred medium was watercolour. Like Syme too, she made her living teaching young women the “polite and useful art” of flower drawing and painting. While Syme lived in Edinburgh, supported and encouraged by the city’s interdisciplinary learned societies, the subject of today’s post lived and worked in Manchester, among the artistic and intellectual circles of that increasingly prosperous industrial city. Like Syme, her work on colour was enormously innovative and forward thinking, and like Syme too, her significance and influence has been subsequently somewhat neglected. In her case, such neglect undoubtedly relates to the fact that she was a woman, with an audience of women.

Her name is Mary Gartside.

In 1805, Mary Gartside published An Essay on Light and Shade, addressing the work to her pupils, young women who, she found, that whatever their experience or expertise in drawing were generally “immediately desirous to paint” – and in order to do so, needed a basic understanding of colour, light and shade. The purpose of Gartside’s work on colour – much like Patrick Syme’s – was eminently practical: while Syme’s Nomenclature enabled anyone who wished to describe or classify the colours of an object in the natural world to do so in reference to a shared language, Gartside wanted her pupils to be able to understand colour in order to represent such objects.

Addressing herself to “a lady who wishes to compose a group of flowers from nature,” Gartside instructed her to begin by thinking about the fact that most flowers “roses, poppies, anemones, convolvulus, auricles, jonquils. . .” shared the same basic circular or spherical structure: “all describe or express circles of different sizes in their general form.” In order to represent such forms effectively, it was essential to understand how strengthening or weakening the strength of the hues one chose from one’s watercolour palette might immediately convey the effect of light and shade

Like many of her Romantic-era contemporaries, Gartside was deeply interested in the relationship between the colour of things in the real world (the effect of light, or additive colour) and the colour of things on the artist’s palette or canvas (the effect of pigments, or subtractive colour). The question of how “visual objects seem possessed / Of those clear hues by light impressed”, as poet Helen Maria Williams had put it, had been theorised by Newton, Goethe and Moses Harris – all of whom Gartside referred to in her essay. Unlike Goethe, Gartside was not particularly interested in the moral meaning or affect of colour, and she took Harris’ ideas about “mediate” and “mixed” colours forward into what she referred to in her essay as “harmonious tints.”

Goethe and Harris both used the colour “wheel” as a representation of their theories of shades, hues and their colourful relationships.

Gartside’s innovation was to represent colour on the page in the way that it might prove most useful to her students, who wished to depict the spherical forms of flowers. Rather than a wheel, displaying the whole spectrum, Gartside represented each colour individually, as a layered blot, which contained many harmoniously blended tints.

Newton, (writing about light) described white as a “primal”, or unmixed colour. Gartside, whose business was the messy materiality of watercolour pigments, uses her visualisation of “white” to impress upon her students how, in the watercolour palette, white is never ever Newtonian: it is never solid, primal or unmixed. White, Gartside reveals, is the ultimate colour of light and shade, containing within itself multiple, shades, tints and chromatic variants of itself.

In the 9 beautiful plates with which her volume was illustrated, Gartside effectively developed a new way for amateur artists to both visualise and deploy colour: not as isolated swatches in a spectrum, or chromatic points on a wheel, but in terms of a series of closely related harmonious tints and gradients. For her, “blue” is not one thing, but a colour that contains many other shades, in a series of continuously overlapping effects.

These blended blots, in which yellow might contain green, or brown, or pink, offered a radically different – but highly accessible – way of visualising and understanding the effect of colour, light and shade – enabling the amateur artist to effectively think in three dimensions.

. . . which Gartside’s students might easily put to practical use with their palettes and sketchbooks..

Like Patrick Syme, Mary Gartside faced the practical problem of producing a book about colour in a world in which commercial colour printing was very much in its infancy. So like Syme, who painted huge sheets of paper in single hues to create his Nomenclature’s tiny swatches, Gartside needed a DIY solution. Alexandra Loske (to whose important work on Gartside I am indebted) speculates that her students were employed in diligent production of the between 1650 and 2000 hand-coloured plates that were required for the book’s first edition.

The first response of contemporary viewers to Gartside’s blots, on seeing them, is generally to exclaim how modern and abstract they seem. And certainly, Gartside’s illustrations of the effects of tint, light and shade seem to speak to a future in which perception, materiality, and the use of colour to represent the world were understood rather differently.

Gartside’s innovative blots possess their own curious, numinous appeal.

But these gorgeous works were also a teaching tool: both aesthetically pleasing and eminently practical, both beautiful and useful.

Further reading

The definitive work on Gartside is that of Alexandra Loske, see: Colour: A Visual History (2019) and “Mary Gartside: A Female Colour Theorist in Georgian England” Journal of Art and Museum Studies (2010).

See also: Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of A Polite and Useful Art (Yale UP, 2000)

You can peruse a digitised edition of Gartside’s Essay here and even purchase a notecard set of her colour studies here