Mary Beale is the first professional British woman artist.
Celebrated now as an early feminist icon for her tremendous success as a portraitist, she was also a poet and author whose book Discourse on Friendship (1667) argued, much ahead of her time, for the equality of husband and wife in a marriage.
Little is known about her early career although at the age of 25, Mary Beale was documented as one of four women artists working in ‘Oly Colours’ in William Sanderson’s publication Graphice. The Use of the Pen and Pencil or The Most Excellent Art of Painting (1658). In 1669, she settled in Pall Mall with her husband Charles and two young sons, and her professional career rapidly flourished. Charles became her studio manager as well as her colorman, providing materials for priming the canvas and production of pigments. In the 1670s Mary became friendly with the influential court painter to Charles II, Sir Peter Lely (1618–1680). Their close relationship resulted in her privileged access to Lely’s insights and personal collection–one of England’s finest at the time–making copies after his work and borrowing elements for her own compositions; conversely, Lely accepted commissions from Beale’s family friends often to be paid for in unconventional terms, such as the provision of ultramarine blue.
Such ancedotes of Beale’s family life, studio practices and client details are meticulously recorded in Charles’s almanacs: in the mid-1670s, at the peak of her career, she was earning over £400 a year; in 1677 alone, she was commissioned to paint eighty-three individual portraits. Remarkably, some 15 different types of frames are noted, as Mary was assertive about the choice of frames for her commissions. Two of the almanacs survived, along with extracts of 5 others copied by the antiquary George Vertue (1684–1756), later published by Horace Walpole, providing rare insight into an art studio jointly run by a husband-and-wife duo during Restoration era London.
Over two hundred paintings were painted by Beale. Her portraits are typically half or three-quarter length. Depicted with a sensuous languor, her sitters emerge from a dark background. The palette is dominated by shimmering earth-tones led by reds and ochres, although some commissions also feature ultramarine or smalt. A repertoire of fashionable accessories would feature, including lace cravats and chemise overoats. Her studio assistants, which would have included her two sons, Bartholomew and Charles in the 1670s, may have assisted in the draperies and in the feigned oval sculpted cartouche framing the visage.
In the last ten years, museums in the English-speaking world have been on a frenzy to collect paintings by Beale. It is hard to believe that until the 1975 exhibition The Excellent Mrs. Mary Beale at the Geffrye Museum her name was more or less forgotten. The organizer Richard Jeffree amassed a large collection of her works, which he donated to the town of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk.
Selected artworks
Top 3 auction prices
2017
2014
2019
Details
Books on Mary Beale
Penelope Hunting, My Dearest Heart: The Artist Mary Beale (1633–1699), 2019.
Tabitha Barber, Mary Beale: Portrait of a Seventeenth-Century Painter, her Family and her Studio, exh. cat., London, 1999.
Christopher Reeve, Mrs Mary Beale, Paintress: A Catalogue of the Paintings Bequeathed by Richard Jaffree, Together with Other Paintings by Mary Beale in the Collections of St Edmundsbury Borough Council, exh. cat., St. Edmundsbury, 1994.
Richard Jeffree and Elizabeth Walsh, The Excellent Mrs. Mary Beale, exh. cat., London, 1975.
Notable Exhibitions
London, Tate Britain, Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520–1920, 16 May – 13 October 2024. Curated by Tabitha Barber.
London, Geffyre Museum, Mary Beale: Portrait of a Seventeenth-Century Painter, her Family and her Studio, 21 September 1999 – 30 January 2000. Curated by Tabitha Barber.
West Bromwich, Manor House Museum, Mrs Mary Beale, Paintress, 1994. Curated by Christopher Reeve.
London, Geffrye Museum, The Excellent Mrs. Mary Beale, 13 October –21 December 1975; travelled to Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, 10 January–21 February 1976. Curated by Richard Jeffree and Elizabeth Walsh.