Blots have been used for centuries to classify, order, compare and present colour, often by taming it in geometric outlines such as circles and squares. One of the earliest attempts at a nomenclature of colours is the “De Mayerne manuscript” (Pictoria, sculptoria et quae subalternarum artium) from 1620–1646, produced by the alchemist Théodore Turquet de Mayerne, the blots half-printed, half-painted, with a specially designed paint pipe . This was probably the inspiration for Richard Waller’s pigment chart from 1686. Both are relatively simple tables of neat circles filled with hand-painted blots of colour. This basic concept of listing colour samples continues to this day, and the circle filled with colour remains the dominant design (although squares and strips are also common).

Alexander CozensMary GartsideYellow blot

Crimson blot

Blue blot

watercolourGartside 1805

Once you start looking for the blot as motif, tool, and theme in colour history, you will find many wondrous examples. The deliberately chance blots of Alexander Cozens (1717–1786) are often mentioned in this context, although strictly speaking they have little to do with colour or colour order and acquire meaning only after they have been created. The blot paintings of the flower painter and art teacher Mary Gartside (c.1755-1819) on the other hand are sophisticated and inventive illustrations of colour in theory and practice. Gartside included eight instructive blots as plates in her watercolour paint manual An Essay on Light and Shade, on Colour, and on Composition in General, first published in London in 1805, in order to illustrate harmonious colour composition in art. They roughly follow the prismatic spectrum, and occupy a space between abstract and representational art, between tamed and untamed colour. As explained in the second edition of the book in 1808, they were meant to represent bunches of flowers, arranged by the flower painter. The book includes some other coloured and uncoloured engraved plates, but these eight blots are freely painted in watercolour, yet following a strict pattern and conceptual thinking about applied colour theory.

Plate “colour contrasts”

George BarnardBarnard 1858BlackWhiteBarnard's sketchbook

chromolithographyLeighton Brothers

Conceptually closest to Gartside are perhaps the blots shown in a plate titled “colour contrasts” in English landscape painter George Barnard’s (1807–1890) The Theory and Practice of Landscape Painting in Water-Colours (first published in London in 1855). The plate depicts a 12-stage development of a pictorial composition, beginning with neutral blacks and white, with colour added at each stage, first primaries and secondaries , then building up to more complex mixtures. Barnard’s blots are crisp and bright, but less subtle than Gartside’s, which is partly due to the mechanical technique of chromolithography (by the Leighton Brothers) . Yet, the idea of visualising colour composition in art as organic-looking abstract forms, suggestive of brushstrokes, is very similar. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that this established, male, Victorian artist and educator would have heard about or seen Gartside’s radical hand-painted colour blots from half a century earlier.