Portrait of a lady

In this engaging portrait by Mary Beale an elegant young woman with long flowing hair stares seductively out at the viewer, one curled tress of hair adorning her left shoulder. Her ample décolletage ends a golden brown silk dress, enveloped by a blue stole. This is a classic portrait from Mary Beale’s mature period, when she regularly depicted her sitters surrounded by faux sculpted wooden ovals. The features of the sitter here bear some resemblance to the contemporaneous literary figure Aphra Behn; although, since her features and hairstyle are also in keeping with other female portraits of the Restoration era, exact identification is not possible.

The verso of Portrait of a lady, c. 1680, bears an undated inscription formerly attributing this portrait to Sir Peter Lely, a contemporary master of portraiture: ‘M. N. Wright / Miss Weston / Sir P. Lely / circa 1650’. Following this work’s reappearance on the art market in 2016, it has been cleaned and restored, and has now been now firmly attributed to Mary Beale by art historian and dealer Philip Mould. The identity of the sitter ‘Miss Weston’ remains questionable, although it has been noted that ‘if deemed to be correct, then it is possible that the subject was connected to the Weston family of Ockham, Surrey, who appear to have patronised the leading portrait painters at that date’.¹Statement on Portrait of a lady, Philip Mould & Company, London, 2017, artist file, National Gallery of Victoria. The relaxed intimacy of this portrait seems to suggest that the sitter, whatever her identity, was a good friend of the artist.

Mary Beale was born Mary Cradock in 1633 in Suffolk, where her father John was the rector of Barrow. John Cradock was an amateur painter and may have provided Mary with her first lessons in art. She is also thought to have received instruction from Robert Walker, who is best known for his portraits of Oliver Cromwell and other politicians in the time of the Commonwealth and Protectorate during 1649 to 1660. It is not known exactly when Mary Beale began practising professionally as a portraitist, although in 1658 she was noted as one of four women artists working in ‘Oyl Colours’ in William Sanderson’s publication Graphice. The Use of the Pen and Pencil or The Most Excellent Art of Painting (1658). Art historian Helen Draper has argued that ‘in view of the taboo against vocational training for gentlewomen, it is likely that Mary was trained as an amateur painter and that her mature proficiency was achieved through a lifelong process of collaborative self-improvement’; while curator Tabitha Barber has noted that ‘in the early 1660s she does not appear to have had a commercially functioning studio’.²Helen Draper, ‘ “Her painting of apricots”: The invisibility of Mary Beale (1633–1699)’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, vol. 48, no. 4, Oct. 2012, p. 393; Tabitha Barber, Mary Beale (1632/3–1699). Portrait of a Seventeenth-Century Painter, Her Family and Her Studio, Geffrye Museum Trust, London, 1999, p. 16.

In 1652 Mary married Charles Beale and the couple had two sons, Bartholomew (born 1656) and Charles (born 1660). In early 1665 the Beales moved to Hampshire for five years, narrowly escaping the Great Plague of London. During this period Charles pursued his interest in the materials of the art trade, such as the priming of canvases and the production of pigments. After the couple moved back to London in 1670, settling in Pall Mall, Mary advertised herself as a professional painter and Charles assumed responsibility for the running of her studio, in addition to working as a colourman.

During the 1670s, Mary Beale enjoyed a close friendship with Peter Lely, Principal Painter to Charles II. She regularly copied Lely’s works, as well as borrowing compositional elements from them for her own portrait compositions. Lely visited the couple at their home in 1672 and again in 1677 when, as Charles recorded in a pocketbook, ‘Mr Lely came to see Mrs Beale’s paintings, several of them he much commended, and upon observation said Mrs Beale was much improv’d in her painting’.³Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, vol. III, 4th edn, J. Dodsley, London, 1786, p. 134. In return the Beale family was invited to study Lely’s own paintings collection. The Beales also commissioned portraits of several of their friends from Lely, which Charles paid for in part with provisions of colours, such as lake and ultramarine blue. Charles filled more than thirty pocketbooks with details of Mary’s portraits and his own colourman practice, as well as biographical references. Two of these pocket books survive, as well as extracts from five others copied down by the antiquary George Vertue, and later published by Horace Walpole, providing remarkable insight into both the Beale’s relationship and their joint running of a commercial art practice in London during the Restoration era. The couple seemed to have had a happy marriage, Charles often referring to Mary in his pocketbooks as ‘Dearest Heart’.⁴Tabitha Barber, Mary Beale (1632/3–1699). Portrait of a Seventeenth-Century Painter, Her Family and Her Studio, Geffrye Museum Trust, London, 1999; Elizabeth Walsh & Richard Jeffree, ‘The Excellent Mrs. Mary Beale’, Geffrye Museum and Inner London Education Authority, London, 1975.

Mary was the primary earner for the family in the 1670s and 1680s, executing dozens of portraits each year, her sitters drawn from London’s clergy, nobility and wealthy citizens of the professional classes. In addition, Mary copied works by the Old Masters. Mary’s portrait practice was particularly profitable during the mid 1670s. In 1677 alone she painted seventy-five commissioned portraits, earning £429.⁵Draper, p. 401. Working from Charles’s notebooks, it has been calculated that Mary’s sitters visited her studio ‘four or five times over a two-month period, depending on the size of portrait, for their likeness to be captured’, indicating the busy nature of the couple’s shared studio practice.⁶Mary Bustin, ‘Experimental secrets and extraordinary colours’, in Tabitha Barber, Mary Beale (1632/3–1699). Portrait of a Seventeenth-Century Painter, Her Family and Her Studio, Geffrye Museum Trust, London, 1999, p. 54. Charles’s pocketbooks record that in the 1670s Mary charged £10 for a ‘half length’ (or three-quarter length portrait) and £5 for a ‘three-quarter’ (a head and shoulders portrait).⁷Walsh & Jeffree, p. 13. At the first sitting, a subject’s features were captured with ‘dead colouring’ (underpainting in monochrome), while other colours were applied in subtle glazes in subsequent sittings. Additional charges were made for the use of expensive pigments such as ultramarine blue (made from the rare, imported lapis lazuli stone). Mary also used smalt (ground blue glass), her husband recording in his pocketbook on 3 May 1676 that ‘I made exchange with Mr Henny, half an ounce of Ultramarine for four pound of his Smalt which he valued at eight shillings a pound, being the best and finest ground Smalt that ever came into England’.⁸Walpole, p. 137. By contrast with smalt, the price of ultramarine was eleven pounds ten shillings per ounce in 1600. See R. D. Harley, Artists’ Pigments c. 1600–1835. A Study in English Documentary Sources, 4th edn, Archetype Publications, London, 1984, p. 45. Mary’s career as a portraitist continued to be successful in the 1680s, during the period that Portrait of a lady was created, although the number of commissions she received appears to have declined over time.

Regarding Mary’s palette, art historian Richard Sword wrote that it

was relatively simple, consisting mainly of the reliable earth colours: yellow ochre, the umbers, red ochre and terre verte … These earth colours, together with ‘blew black’ (vine black, made from charred vegetable matter) and ‘ceruse’ (white lead) have a surprising range and must be considered the basis of her palette.⁹Richard Sword, ‘Pigments, supports, primings and media used by Mary Beale’, in Walsh & Jeffree, p. 65.

However this muted palette has been criticised as ‘the painter’s usual brown quality in the flesh … and her usual colourlessness’.¹⁰C. H. Collins Baker, Lely and the Stuart Portrait Painters, vol. II, Philip Lee Warner, London, 1912, p. 40. These criticisms do not apply to Portrait of a lady, where the sitter’s rosy complexion contrasts pleasingly with the alabaster hues of her shoulders and bosom, and gleaming pearls bring grace notes to the fabrics in which she is attired.

Once Mary had finished the face of a portrait composition, studio assistants would help complete the work by painting in draperies and the heavy three-dimensional faux wood or stone oval settings that surrounded her sitter’s features, in lieu of natural or indoor settings. In the mid 1670s these assistants were the couple’s two sons, Bartholomew and Charles, who probably worked on Portrait of a lady in this capacity.¹¹‘In their maturity, both sons would assist Mary’s production of portraits for her respectable clientele by painting costumes and illusionistic Baroque-style cartouches for framing busts’. See Lisa Mansfield, ‘Mary Beale: pioneer of portraiture’, in Annika Aitken et al. (eds), She Persists: Perspectives on Women in Art & Design, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2020, p. 21.

Charles’s pocketbooks also contain detailed information concerning the framing of Mary’s portraits, which seems to have been undertaken by the artist herself rather than the sitter or the person commissioning a portrait from her. Four frame makers are listed, as well as some fifteen types of frames, including ‘bunched gilt frame’, ‘raffle leaf frame’, ‘leather work gilt frame’ and ‘little ebony frames and glass’. Author Mansfield Talley writes that the bunched gilt frames ‘may refer to a design made up of cluster of leaves, fruit, and the like … perhaps along the lines of certain Dutch Louis XIII style frames’.¹²Mansfield Kirby Talley, Portrait Painting in England: Studies in the Technical Literature before 1700, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 1981, p. 300. The carved softwood frame on Portrait of a lady is in the style of British Baroque frames of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Although it cannot be confirmed that the current frame is original to the painting, it does feature a ‘running pattern’ Louis XIII design, interspersed with scalloped shapes known as ‘gadrooned reposes’.¹³Paul Mitchell & Lynn Roberts, A History of European Picture Frames, Paul Mitchell and Merrell Holberton, London, 1996, p. 61, illus. 43c. Holly McGowan Jackson, Senior Curator of Frames and Furniture, National Gallery of Victoria, kindly provided this reference. A similar Louis XIII ‘running pattern’ design is also featured on another painting by Mary Beale, Portrait of a lady, half-length, in a gold dress with a white chemise (date unknown), which was sold at Sotheby’s London on 24 May 2017.

Ted Gott, Senior Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria