Why Goethe and Not Gartside?

It is difficult to write about Mary Gartside without asking why her name is so often missing. Her work New Theory of Colours was published in 1808—two years before Goethe’s famous theory of colors—and anticipated many of his ideas remarkably well. Yet Gartside’s name is nowhere to be found in the footnotes of Goethe research or in the established secondary literature on color theory. It is striking how consistently she has been overlooked in academic reception, even though her ideas provide a remarkably independent foundation for a subjective theory of color.

Although there is so far no clear evidence that Goethe knew her work—a charge of plagiarism would be inappropriate—the question of why Goethe is regarded as the central figure of a subjective color theory while Gartside was almost forgotten is justified. The rediscovery of her texts is thanks to the German-British art historian Alexandra Loske, who came across Gartside during her PhD research at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. Since then, she has been continuously working to bring Gartside’s contribution to color theory into the light of art historical research, thereby opening up a largely overlooked chapter in the history of color.

Color as Sensation – Gartside versus Newton

At a time when Newton’s spectral decomposition of light was regarded as an almost untouchable paradigm, Gartside pursued a contrary approach. While Newton explained colors physically—as broken components of white light—Gartside emphasized subjective perception. For her, color was not a measurable quantity but a feeling. A “moral effect”—as she called it—emanated from colors; each color carried emotional and psychological qualities far beyond the physical level.

Thus, she wrote not only against Newton’s objectivism but established—much like Goethe later—a distinct phenomenologically oriented theory of color. Yet while Goethe’s work enjoyed centuries of reception, Gartside’s voice remained unheard for a long time. Her countercurrent to Newtonian theory remained a side note—unjustly so. Gartside recognized early on that color cannot simply be explained by wavelengths but arises from a complex interplay of light, surface, environment, and sensation.

The Blots – Color as an Autonomous Phenomenon

A particular feature of Gartside’s work are the so-called “blots”—cloud-like color stains that she incorporated as an integral part of her books. These color fields stand for a radical idea: color does not have to illustrate; it can speak for itself. The “blots” express an experimental way of thinking that understands color not merely as a means to an end but as an independent artistic medium.

At a time when abstraction as a concept did not yet exist, Gartside created visual color field compositions that depicted neither form nor object. Rather, they were meant to make the intrinsic effect of color—its emotional resonance, its luminous power, its harmony—immediately tangible. Some art historians see in this a foreshadowing of abstract painting, which only became popular a century later with artists like Hilma af Klint or Wassily Kandinsky. Gartside combined poetic sensitivity with systematic observation—a remarkable balancing act between feeling and structure.