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I have portrayed the first poppy in the orchard of the Pedralbes monastery in Barcelona with my reflection technique. Its shadows are in color. As the romantic essayist Leigh Hunt cheerfully noted in 1840, "colors are the smiles of nature."
This leads me to talk in The Photos of the Readers of La Vanguardia about the figure of Mary Gartside (1755 -1819), an English watercolorist and color theorist who published three books between 1805 and 1808 and who can be considered to have challenged the theory. of Isaac Newton on color years before Goethe.
Gartside can be seen as a link between Moses Harris, who published his brief Natural System of Colors around 1766, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's highly influential theory, Zur Farbenlehre, first published in 1810.1
Gartside's color theory, the first formulated by a woman, was published privately under the guise of a traditional watercolor manual.
The Essay on Light and Shadow, on Colors and on Composition in General reveals the great creative genius of Gartside, who wanted to illustrate the harmonies and contrasting tones of primary and secondary colors through a series of "spots." abstract.
He experimented with works whose titles made his intention clear: "white", "yellow", "orange", "green", "scarlet", "blue", "violet" and "crimson".
There is considered to be no other example of a representation of color systems that is as inventive and groundbreaking as Gartside's color "blobs."
Gartside exhibited his watercolor flower paintings at the Royal Academy of Art in 1781, at the Liverpool Botanic Gardens in 1784, and at the Associated Artists in Water-Color in London in 1808.
