ABSTRACT
Mary Philadelphia Merrifield (née Watkins) was a British writer on art, colour theory, and fashion. She studied the history of painters’ materials and techniques and successfully translated Cennino Cennini’s early fifteenth-century work entitled Treatise of Painting. She then published The Art of Fresco Painting and Original Treatises on the Arts of Painting. Merrifield was also a noted student of botany and was a prominent algologist. Her work on colour became significant when she was assigned by the Royal Commission on the Fine Arts, to travel to France and Italy, in order to identify and transcribe manuscripts on colour, and research the make-up of early pigments and Italian methods of painting. Apart from being a critic of clothes design, Merrifield, in her writing, engaged with other women’s issues such as equal pay, a shorter working week and espousing the health benefits of rejecting corsets and using more rationally designed clothes that suited the body.
