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Alexandra Loske on the day she found Miss Gartside's grave at Stokesay

One of Gartside's abstracts blots from her 1805 book on colour

An engraving from 1905 of the picturesque setting of Stokesay Castle in Shropshire

Memories in Landscape: Finding Miss Gartside

With only fragmentary and sparse information about Mary Gartside, the first woman in Western culture who published an illustrated book on colour theory (and practice), Loske embarked on a journey to Shropshire in July 2025 to find her grave, in the hope to find out more about how Gartside lived, worked, and died. She knew from a few short notices in papers that Gartside had died in December 1819, aged 64, in a coaching inn at Craven Arms, just north of Ludlow, where she had latterly lived. Nothing else was known about the circumstance, her last resting place, or where exactly she had been living in Ludlow. Loske had been researching Gartside for many years and had included her in almost all her publications and lectures on colour history, as part of her wider research into the lives and work of women in the field. This research is based at the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research (see Lives in Colour).

Seeing the area where Gartside spent her last years, walking and driving through the countryside around Ludlow, and exploring the place where she died (the coaching inn at Craven Arms survives, but is in a delapidated state and is about to be redeveloped), resulted in a deeper understanding of what landscape means, and what kind of memories places hold.

Within three days, Loske found Gartside's final resting place, at the foot of the picturesque Stokesay Castle, following some detective work, conversations with local people, and simply by thoroughly searching several graveyards in the area. She was buried in the graveyard of the Church of St John the Baptist, next to Stokesay Castle, on 14 December 1819, five days after her death at the coaching inn, which is just a couple of miles away. The gravestone does not survive but its approximate location and inscription are recorded in an early 20th century notebook in the Shropshire Archives, where Loske also located Gartside's burial record. It confirmed Loske's theory that Gartside had died suddenly, while on the way to Lancashire, where she was from, possibly to visit family.

This led to the unexpected discovery that since approximately the 1970s, Gartside's first name had been incorrectly recorded as Mary (possibly a bibliographical error). Instead, her name was Martha Gartside. Further research, including the location of her will, confirmed this, and revealed details of how and where she lived and worked. Gartside herself never used her full name in any contemporary records, possibly to keep her gender hidden in literature. Much literature, and many entries in libray and museum catalogues now need to be corrected, but the discovery of her real name also opens up opportunities for new research avenues, and may explain why her exact date and place of birth have not yet been discovered. For Loske, the location of Gartside's grave and being able to give her back her real name, was an emotional experience, and the unexpected highpoint of many years of searching for the life and work of a woman who had until recently been overlooked in literature on the history of colour and art.

Since those momentous days in rural Shropshire, Loske has updated her own chapter on Gartside in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, written three entries on Gartside for a new edition of The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Romantic-Era Women's Writing (upcoming, 2026), and on 17 September 2025 presented a stand-alone lecture, featuring this new research, for the Regency Society of Brighton and Hove: Georgian Colour - Finding Miss Gartside. She has also been invited to contribute an article on Gartside in a 2026 issue of The Burlington Magazine. She is now working on a compendium of all extant work by Gartside, authored with PhD candidate Lara Lee Meintjes (Berkeley) with the Lever Press, Ann Arbor, MI. 

Further information: https://www.sussex.ac.uk/research/centres/centre-for-life-history-and-life-writing-research/research/projects/lives-in-colour

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