Mary Beale Art

Mary Beale was one of the most successful professional female Baroque art portrait painters of the late 17th century. She started painting alongside her father, whose membership in The Painter-Stainers’ Company introduced her to the renowned court painter Peter Lely and many of his contemporaries. At 18, she married Charles Beale, a colour-mixer, Charles would stretch many of her canvases and mix pigments for work. Later, Charles would meticulously record Mary’s artistic process, clientele and technique, giving us a rare window into the world of a brilliant woman flourishing in a nearly exclusively male field. Mary would paint the noted physician Thomas Sydenham, who wrote The foundational medical text observationes medicae, the politician, William Pierrepont, John Lake, the Bishop of Chichester, John Tillotson, the Archbishop of Canterbury and John Maitland (1616–82), Duke of Lauderdale. Beale’s catalog became a who’s who of London’s most influential and she was prolific.