Mary Beale

Posted by Barbara on June 24, 2024 in Art, Blog, Exhibition, women artists, women artists, Women's equality issues | 2 comments

Watching the airwaves roll around the latest piece of bile to come out of Putin-apologist Nigel Farage’s mouth, my blood pressure was quicky soothed by learning more about portrait painter Mary Beale (1633-16990). She was one of Britain’s first professional woman artists.

Beale was part of a small band of female artists working in London. She became the main financial provider for her family through her professional work – a career she maintained over 20 years. This was made possible due to a radical reversal of conventional gender roles for the period. Beale’s husband Charles dedicated himself to his wife’s career and supported her studio diligently by priming canvases, manufacturing pigments, and recording business in a series of notebooks.

Beale was born and brought up in Suffolk. She received no formal artistic training, but her vocation was prompted by her family environment. Her father was an amateur artist and miniature painter.  She was given advice on painting by Sir Peter Lely (1618–1680), one of the most distinguished artists of his day in England.  Her family sat for portraits by Lely, he lent Mary his work to study, and she was later to earn a part of her income from commissions to make copies of his portraits.

After they married, Mary and Charles Beale moved to London.  The Beale studio, which they saw as a family affair, was a place alive with experiment.  Charles managed the business, and he also played an important role in supporting his wife’s work through technical experiments with pigments and materials, exploring ways in which to speed up the drying time of oil paint, and to mix expensive colours more cost-effectively, in order to make commissions more profitable. Mary Beale painted on expensive imported linen, but also on sacking, and even, at times, on onion bags and striped bed ticking fabric. At the height of her career Beale’s studio was in Pall Mall – an extremely fashionable location.

Her subjects for her portraits numbered aristocrats, prominent clergymen, society people and political figures, both pro- and anti-royalist; her painting career spanned the civil war, the execution of Charles I, the period of the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell and the Restoration of the Monarchy.

Beale also painted a portrait of Aphra Behn, Britain’s first professional woman writer, and Beale also wrote – most notably a ‘Discourse on Friendship’ in1667.  Beale argues from the story of Adam and Eve that a true marriage should be a marriage of equals. ‘For when God had at first created him, it is not Fit said he, that Man should be alone, so then he gave him Eve, to be a meet help, and what can that imply but that God gave here for a Friend as well as for a wife…’ She later refers to ‘a small number who by Friendships interposition have restored this marriage bond to its first institution’. She may have been drawing on the works of earlier women writers, but it was still a radical proposition for the period.

The Philip Mould Gallery on Pall Mall, just where Beale’s studio was located, has an exhibition till July 19 featuring twenty-five of her works from public and private collections entitled Fruit of Friendship.  It includes self-portraits, portraits of her family and friends, and formal commissions. Catch it if you can.