Mary Beale

Ian Stewart (d. 2019), Beal House, Yorkshire;

His posthumous sale ('The Contents of Beal House, Yorkshire'), Edinburgh, Lyon & Turnbull, 14 October 2020, lot 79;

With Isherwood Fine Art, Bath;

From whom presumably acquired by the present owner.

Mary Beale is the best known of very few female artists of the seventeenth century in Britain.¹ She established her own independent commercial studio in London, and made a living from her profession for over twenty years, all without court patronage, affiliation to an artist's guild, or any formal artistic training. Beale's success led her to paint society figures from the aristocracy down, and to produce self-portraits, which overtly celebrate her talent as an artist. Beale was a pioneer for female painters in Britain. Her career defied the disadvantages experienced by women at the time, let alone those seeking to earn their own living in a terrain that was difficult even for male painters, since Britain had relied for so long on foreign artists. Held in high esteem in her own lifetime, and her work praised only seven years after her death in Bainbrigg Buckeridge's essay on the 'English School' in The Art of Painting, and the Lives of the Painters (1706), as 'little inferiour to any of her contemporaries, either for Colouring, Strength, Force or Life [sic.]', Beale's personality and œuvre fell into obscurity in the nineteenth century and was not seriously revived or studied until 1975,² since when she has been rightly celebrated as a distinctive artist in her own right.

¹ In 2019, Dr Bendor Grosvenor, with Lyon & Turnbull, shed more light on Beale and two other pioneering women painters: Joan Carlile - the first professional female British painter - and Anne Killigrew, in the exhibition 'Bright Souls'. The forgotten story of Britain's First Female Artists, Lyon & Turnbull, London, 24 June - 6 July 2019.

² In 1975, so-called International Women's Year, Richard Jeffree and Elizabeth Walsh put together a corpus of Beale's works and the exhibition 'The Excellent Mrs Mary Beale', Geffrye Museum, London, 13 October - 21 December 1975, and Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, 10 January - 21 February 1976.