The Color Women: Mary Gartside and Emily Noyes Vanderpoel

Fig 1: (left) Blue, Mary Gartside, from ’An essay on light and shade’, 1805. Source: Alexandra Loske. (right) Emily Noyes Vanderpoel, Plate V — Advancing and Retiring Colors, Color problems; a practical manual for the lay student of color (1902) Source: Hathitrust.org.

In “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (1971), feminist art historian Linda Nochlin turned the commonly accepted ideas of genius upside down. She demonstrated how greatness has as much, if not more, to do with social access (education, current ideas and trends, patronage, distribution, etc.) as it does with unique traits and abilities. For the same reason that there are no ‘famous…