Mary Gartside’s New Theory Of Colours

The overlooked precursor to Kandinsky, Goethe and Newton

From Mary Gartside's A New Theory Of Colours

The English artist Mary Gartside worked as a watercolour teacher and botanical painter, exhibiting at London’s Royal Academy in 1781.

She is also one of the only nineteenth-century artists to have written a theoretical work on colour – her third book – published by Gardiner, Miller and Arch in 1808.

A New Theory Of Colours includes detailed writing on the application of colour, and is considered a precursor to work by Kandinsky, Goethe and Newton.

The hand-coloured illustrations for book are deemed some of the earliest examples of abstract painting, while Gartside’s conclusions set the foundation for the idea that the eye of the beholder is ‘the centre and origin of colour perception’.

Around the web:

Mary Gartside at The Public Domain Review