Everything about Mary Beale totally explained
Mary Beale (née Cradock) (
March 26,
1633 -
1699) was an
English portrait painter. She became one of the most important portrait painters of 17th century England, and has been described as the first professional female English painter.
Beale was born in
Barrow, Suffolk, the daughter of John Cradock, a
Puritan rector. Her mother, Dorothy, died when she was 10. She married Charles Beale, a cloth merchant from
London, in 1652, at the age of 18. Her father and her husband were both amateur painters, her father being a member of the
Painter-Stainers' Company, and she was acquainted with local local artists, such as
Nathaniel Thach,
Matthew Snelling,
Robert Walker and
Peter Lely. She became a semi-professional portrait painter in the 1650s and 1660s, working from her home, first in
Covent Garden and later in
Fleet Street.
The family moved to a farmhouse in
Allbrook,
Hampshire in 1665 due to financial difficulties, her husband having lost his position as a clerk of
patents, and also due to the
Great Plague in
London. For the next five years, a 17th-century two storey timber-framed building, now boarded up and threatened by development, was her family home and studio. She returned to London in 1670, where she established a
studio in
Pall Mall, with her husband working as her assistant, mixing her paints and keeping her accounts. She became successful, and her circle of friends included
Thomas Flatman, poet
Samuel Woodford,
Archbishop of Canterbury John Tillotson, and
Bishops
Edward Stillingfleet and
Gilbert Burnet. She became reacquainted with
Peter Lely, now Court Artist to
Charles II. Her later work is heavily influenced by Lely, being mainly small portraits or copies of Lely's work. Her work became unfashionable after his death in 1680.
A son, Bartholomew, died young. A second son, another Bartholomew, painted portraits before taking up medicine. A third son, named
Charles after his father, was also a painter, specialising mainly in
miniatures. She is buried at
St. James's, Piccadilly. Her husband died in 1705.
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