The Color Women: Mary Gartside and Emily Noyes Vanderpoel
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 Eskimo [sic] tennis players’, women were often absent from the esteemed canon of Western art and science and the history of color and color theory is no exception. But recent scholarship Dr. Alexandra Loske and John Ptak has begun to identify women who were actively involved in color research and whose insights and ideas have prefigured later developments more often associated with men. Mary Gartside in England and Emily Noyes Vanderpoel in America are two such women. They both published books on color theory in their lifetimes and characteristically presented their work as painting manuals under the guise and genre of flower painting and the decorative arts — areas befitting to women of their time. But these were more than the traditional ‘manuals for ladies’. They were works of great originality and learning, and in many ways ahead of their time. Their ideas on color focused primarily on the phenomenology and experience of color, color harmony, modulation and color relationships…
