‘Her Painting of Apricots’: The Invisibility of Mary Beale (1633–1699)

Abstract

On 14 August 1663, Mary Beale recorded her thoughts on how best to paint apricots. The manuscript, Observations by MB, is the first known text in English about the act of painting written by a female artist and one of the earliest pieces of instructive writing by any female painter.¹ In a little over two hundred and fifty words, clearly addressed to an unknown future readership, Mary Beale's statement reveals something of her intentions and concerns as a painter, and is all the more remarkable for having been written at a time when convention expected married gentlewomen to be deferential, modest and virtually silent. This monogrammed and dated mission statement is anything but modest: it is an authoritative exemplar for others to follow, and it represents the painter's implicit acceptance of her place in a shared artistic inheritance and a stake in her own legacy for the future. Although never published in printed form, Observations may nonetheless be one of the earliest English instructive texts about painting in oil, by a working artist of either gender.² Furthermore, although Observations was written entirely by Mary, it appears at the end of her husband Charles Beale's book of similar notes, so that the notebook as a whole is a unique example of husband-and-wife collaboration in the history of technical literature on painting. And, as we shall see, collaboration in marriage, friendship and business is a central theme in the Beales' story.

Beale was already a practising artist by the 1650s, but it was not until 1670, aged thirty-eight, that she became a professional portraitist whose work supported her household. Initially a civil service clerk, Charles Beale (1631–1705) eventually became Mary's studio manager. The couple, with their two sons, ran a sociable and prolific family-based studio in fashionable St James's in Restoration London. Their circle of friends included courtiers, intellectuals, clergymen, lawyers, and artistic and literary figures, prominent and obscure. As well as the many formal portraits commissioned by what Charles termed ‘persons of quality’ in his studio records, Mary's extant body of work comprises self-portraits and intimate studies of family and friends painted ‘for study and improvement’; a manuscript, ‘Discourse on Friendship’ (1666); four poems printed in 1667; and a single letter to a friend (1666). These painted and written texts all offer limited but valuable clues about how Mary saw her place in the world as artist, wife, friend, mother and Christian.

Although subsequent biographical and art historical narratives on Beale took their cue from writings by her male circle, and from eighteenth-century commentators George Vertue and Horace Walpole, Observations is just one of several keyholes through which we can espy Mary more directly.³ Taken together with Beale's other texts and her self-portraits spanning the years 1659 to 1681, Observations forms part of an oblique autobiography with the emphasis placed on the acquisition of self-knowledge through study and application, and the practice of ‘true’ friendship after the classical ideal. The overall tone of this ‘virtual’ memoir is not humble, however, and in it Beale speaks from her own experience, is full of intent, and often assumes a didactic position of rhetorical and painterly authority.

Mary's first known painting, Self-portrait with husband and son of c. 1660 (Geffrye Museum, London) (Figure 1), and Observations, with its confident tone, are the first pages of her virtual memoir and demonstrate that Beale was, even as an amateur, intent on self-fashioning and promotion. Observations should be read as an implied statement of intent encoded in what appears, when seen in isolation, to be technical information:

Observations by MB in her painting of Apricots in August 1663. your dead Color⁴ being perfectly dry, temper yo^r severall sorts of Mastcots⁵ with nut oyle⁶ and let them ly for half an houre and when you are ready to use them temp them againe, this giveth a fatnes⁷ to y^e Color wch is of great advantage in y^e covering of them. ffor the greenish Coloring mingle whitelead,⁸ middle masticot, Bury oker,⁹ pinke,¹⁰ and a very litle faire Ultramarine¹¹ together, without y^e Bury Oker y^e Color will bee raw & fierce; in ye pale yallow places leave out y^e Ultramarine; where it inclineth more to redness let y^e composition bee whitelead, red Lead¹² red masticot & a litle pinke: Let yo^r heigthenings in yo^r very ripe apricots bee whitelead, pale Mast: and a litle redlead. in les ripe ones less or none of y^e red lead. Let yor shadowes bee pinke & Lake¹³ and Bury oker & in some places […] according as y^e life requireth it a litle fine Ultramarine: in some other places where y^e shadowes are glowing & ffaint as they are sometimes in y^e Crowne there touch upon yo^r generall rendering with pinke & Vermilion¹⁴ mixed together: 14^oAugusti 1663. […] Bury oker is by no means to bee left out in y^e painting of apricots, because it adds a naturallnes to y^e complexion of y^e fruite, and makes y^e rest of y^e Color worke abundantly better. Those apricots I painted before I made use of Bury oker were muche harsher colored & nothing so soft.¹⁵

Figure 1:

Self-portrait of Mary Beale with her husband Charles and son Bartholomew, c. 1660; oil on canvas; Geffreye Museum, London.

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Mary Beale's statement was created privately but was clearly intended for consumption by an unknown public readership, her two sons, perhaps, or the gentlemen virtuosi who avidly sought out books and manuscripts about art.¹⁶ Although Observations has not previously been printed, manuscript copies of it may have been circulated and it is impossible to quantify the part it has played in informing biographical, intellectual or artistic assumptions about the artist over the last three hundred and forty-nine years. Public or private, the text is nevertheless a statement designed not to explain her own work or to describe its origins, but rather to declare the fact of her being an artist.

In Observations Beale's approach to painting – as a process of observation and experiment, refinement and distillation – is made clear by the care she takes to mark the minute colour changes in fruit at different stages of ripeness. The writer does not interpret her own paintings for the reader or viewer, but instead retraces her steps in the creative process in order to describe the artist's relation to her subject. Explicitly, the intention is to explain the physical act of putting brush to canvas to create a naturalistic impression of fruit. In addressing a third person, however, the implication is that she valued her own expertise highly enough to presume to guide others and, through her influence, to promote herself.

Mary Beale's present, past and future are here encapsulated. The artist writes of her past experience for future painters who will use her advice and spread her name so that, in the process, she will take her place in the narrative of the art of her time. In ‘her painting of Apricots’ Mary has therefore constructed a story about memory – the memory of her actual experience of the qualities of light, colour and paint, and even of the passing of seasons as embodied in the fruits themselves, with the greenish tones and vibrant yellows of summer giving way to the red ripeness of early autumn. And the statement, like her surviving paintings, contains the memory of her very existence as a painter, whose time came and went, and of the traces of knowledge she left behind for posterity.

In the 1660s Beale was, to all appearances, an amateur artist painting portraits of her family and friends, and for love rather than money. It was quite a different proposition for Mary Beale to become an overtly professional artist in her own home, painting people with whom she was not acquainted, in return for cash. Having an endless stream of visiting kinfolk is one thing, but inviting male strangers into her home for commercial purposes could easily have been misconstrued. To find an audience for their creative work beyond the domestic setting, seventeenth-century women like Mary Beale had first to confirm their virtuous reputations and modest intentions, but this could be a fraught and time-consuming business. Mary negotiated these obstacles on her path into the public consciousness, using texts, paintings and friendship as her tools.

It was through a gradual process of carefully chosen collaborations that the Beales and their circle managed to create a personal persona for Mary that enabled her to become a professional painter. She built upon the virtuous reputation she had gained as a domestic amateur and later relied on this sociable studio model to lend her professional practice the required air of respectability. In this way the ‘persons of quality’ who came to sit to her could be perceived as guests, rather than paying customers. Mary capitalized on the courtly culture of gift exchange that was commonplace within her wider circle. Inscribed portraits and texts were given as gestures of affection, but also as payment in kind for favours and loans. The Beales used the established pattern of giving and exchanging likenesses for love to make the selling of portraits acceptable as an extension of the currency of friendship.

In order to appreciate the full significance of Mary's ‘memoir’, and her singular choice of career, it is necessary to examine first the social context in which she was born. Mary Cradock was baptized on 26 March 1633 by her clergyman father, John Cradock (1595–1652), in his church near Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. There is no evidence to suggest how or when Mary became interested in art, or from whom she learned to paint. Writing about Mary, Vertue conjectured that she may have been instructed by Sir Peter Lely (1618–1680), later destined to be court painter to Charles II; or by Robert Walker (1599–1658), the Parliamentarians' favourite.¹⁷ Given the social restrictions placed on women it is very difficult to see how the adolescent Mary could have been formally apprenticed, in all safety and propriety, unless it was to an unknown female artist, especially given the inherent logistical problems in arranging any meaningful period of tuition during the Civil Wars. Mary's father is likely to have provided the greater part of her general education and, as he was an amateur artist, this would probably have included tuition in drawing and painting.¹⁸ Mary Edmond has suggested that the Cradocks and other painters, including the gentleman amateur Sir Nathaniel Bacon (1585–1627), Mary's first cousin Nathaniel Thache (1617–after 1652) and local painter Matthew Snelling (1621–1678) could all be associated with what she described as a ‘seventeenth-century art centre’ based around Bury St Edmunds.¹⁹ Snelling was certainly known to Beale and in the 1650s sent her parcels of ‘pinke’, a contrarily-named yellow pigment that is also associated with Bacon.²⁰

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. In the context of the thriving artistic community in the vicinity of her Suffolk home, it is entirely plausible that Mary Cradock received piecemeal instruction, some from her father and some, perhaps, from their local circle of amateur and semi-professional artists.²¹ Mary, like most other adolescents in the early modern period, may have done genteel service in the household of a higher-status family, perhaps one in which the young gentlefolk were tutored in drawing or painting.²²

Charles Beale was born in June 1631 at Walton, the Buckinghamshire manor of his father, Bartholomew Beale of Gray's Inn. Nothing is known of Charles's education or early years until 1647/8, when he started to record his artistic activities in his technical notebook, Experimentall Seacrets found out in the way of my owne painting. Here he explained how to ‘heighten to make things shine […] ffound out in the painting of a raw Rabit’.²³Experimentall Seacrets is a 24-leaf, leather-bound notebook with entries compiled between 1648 and 1663, the last of which is Observations by MB. Another fifty entries describe the act of painting, or making and selling pigments. Charles recorded his experiments in detail, and included admonitions to his unknown reader to keep all kettles and pots scrupulously clean. Interestingly, observations on the process, yield and value of each ‘tryall’ in manufacturing were never divorced from remarks about the beauty, ‘body’ and strength of the colour produced, and complement both authors' directions for describing three-dimensional, multi-textured, many-hued objects with paint. Mary Bustin has speculated that Charles's notebook may be a record of his work as an apprentice or studio assistant with a professional artist.²⁴ It is equally likely, without evidence to the contrary, that Charles learned about painting in a similarly rigorous but amateur setting, perhaps in the household of a gentleman artist like that of Nathaniel Bacon.

If, as I suggest, Mary and Charles had each learned about painting in family homes rather than in hierarchical and competitive Masters' workshops, the convivial and self-improving approach to art and work, so evident in the manuscripts, was well established long before they married. Charles's notebook, and the presence of Mary's Observations in it, lends credence to a scenario in which the married couple pooled their experience and built upon it to learn the complex secrets of paint and canvas. Charles continued to experiment with artists' materials into the 1680s, and Mary's ceaseless study of the practice of painting suggests that they had to work hard to adapt their amateur training to the commercial demands of a professional studio. Later, the Beales used the domestic model of training once again, this time to teach their young sons, Bartholomew and Charles, how to paint the draperies and decorative cartouches in their mother's portraits.

Mary and Charles married in 1652 and were settled in Covent Garden by 1655/6, part of the larger community of artists, framers and colourmen. The Beales moved to London, each equipped with a modest wealth of inherited connections to the aristocracy, clergy and civil service, and proceeded to gather around them a diverse mix of acquaintances that included many prominent Anglican clergymen; Dr Robert Wild, the nonconformist minister and satirical poet; Thomas Flatman, poet, miniaturist and lawyer; Mr Carter, the artists' colourman; Robert Boyle, founder member of the Royal Society; Under Secretary John Cooke of Whitehall; the King's painting restorer, Parry Walton; and Richard Gibson, the dwarf miniaturist employed at Court.²⁵ Charles, like other young gentlemen who aspired to civil service, can have had little expectation of objectivity in the process of recruitment, as places were bought with inherited wealth and were conferred through patronage. For aspirant young people it was vitally important to cultivate family connections and to create resilient new alliances as the means of securing patronage, and of obtaining the social and commercial leverage that went with it. Craig Muldrew has established that it was also essential for everyone to demonstrate their personal trustworthiness, for it was this which enabled them to participate in the exchanges of credit and obligation on which the early modern economy was based.²⁶ One's reputation was analogous to one's creditworthiness, social and commercial, and both were crucially important to the survival of every individual and every household, high or low.

Seventeenth-century convention had it that married gentlewomen were expected to work within the home, keeping house and mothering, while the financial needs of the household were ideally to be provided for by the earnings of their husbands. Moral rhetoric espoused in contemporary conduct books and from pulpits declared that the soundness of a respectable woman's reputation rested on virtues that included self-confinement within the home; diligence in her familial duties; deference to her husband to the point of silence; modesty and, in particular, chastity. Using court records as their sources, recent commentators have demonstrated that in disputes of all sorts women were frequently denigrated for being slovenly, opinionated, lecherous and adulterous, and have deduced from this that the substance of contemporary rhetoric was reflected in the expectations society had of women's behaviour. Furthermore, they conclude that it was the wife's reputation which set the tone of the whole household, gave it moral stability and determined its level of trustworthiness.²⁷ It was a serious business for a housewife to risk her respectable reputation by putting her head above the parapet built around the roles and activities conventionally ascribed to women.

Thus the newly married Beales and their extended network of friends and kin were compelled to create impeccable individual and collective reputations that would illustrate their respectability in personal and social life, and their trustworthiness in commercial interactions with the wider community. The autobiographical texts written by the Beales and their inner circle make it clear that rather than being antithetical and hostile, the realms of friendship, family and commerce were often closely entwined, and not only was this inter-relationship commonplace, it was seen by all parties as natural and desirable. Mary, Charles and their circle valued their closest friendships as bulwarks against the vicissitudes of fate, but also as alliances to further their intersecting needs and ambitions; they worked separately and together to establish respectable reputations and to promote the circle's interests.

From the absence of commissions recorded in the earliest of Charles's studio notebooks, Vertue surmised that Mary Beale did not paint professionally until the 1670s, but we can be sure that she was painting by 1654 because of the pigment sent to her by Suffolk artist Matthew Snelling.²⁸ In 1658 Beale was included in a list of female painters in Sir William Sanderson's book Graphice: Or The use of the Pen and Pensil; In the most Excellent Art of PAINTING:

in Oyl Colours [wrote Sanderson] we have a virtuous example in that worthy Artist Mrs. Carlile: and of others Mr[s]. Beale, Mrs. Brooman, and to Mrs. Weimes.²⁹

The reference to Beale is important, not least as an indication that she was already known to be an artist of some ability. Indeed, Mary Beale's later, apparently overnight, transition from noteworthy and ‘virtuous’ amateur to professional portraitist may well have depended on just the type of measured public exposure as was afforded by inclusion in Sir William's select list of gentlewomen. Two commendatory poems by the Beales' intimate friend Thomas Flatman (1637–1688) were given a prominent place at the front of Sanderson's book. Flatman's acquaintance with the author of Graphice may have been a factor in the inclusion of Mary Beale's name in the list of female painters at an early stage in her artistic career. It is also likely that Sanderson commended Beale because he wanted to be credited with the discernment of recognizing a painterly talent in the making. The evident link between Sanderson, Flatman and the Beales provides an example of how networks were pooled by the Beale circle to promote the reputations of its members in a respectable context. The quid pro quo in this type of exchange also took more tangible forms. Later, in 1661, Flatman painted a miniature of Charles Beale and presented it to him inscribed as a gift. In the same year Charles recorded a payment to Flatman for other portrait miniatures painted for the Beale family.

By December 1658 Charles had been made a Deputy-Clerk at the Patents Office, probably through the influence of his family. The Beales moved into a house on Hind Court, just off Fleet Street in the parish of St Dunstan-in-the-West, where they lived until 1665. This large parish ‘without’ the city walls was one of great contrasts, encompassing prosperous Fleet Street as well as the poor, overcrowded alleys of Whitefriars.³⁰ Many of the businesses, including numerous taverns and pastry-cooks, were there to service the Inns of Court at Chancery Lane and the Temple. Hind Court was salubrious and the Beales' neighbours included wealthy professionals and merchants, many living in imposing houses. The first direct references to Mary's painting activities, and to art collecting, were made in manuscripts created at Hind Court. Vertue saw Charles's now lost studio notebook for the year 1661 and recalled seeing in it a bill for dozens of ‘painting tools pencills, brushes goose & swan fitches’ that came to ‘5li.5s.0.’.³¹ In August and September of the same year Charles described preparing ‘quantities of primed paper to paint on’, and had made an inventory of their ‘Frames Cloths. &c utensils’ and ‘colours’. Beale's list of household goods also included several paintings by van Dyck, Rubens, Lely, Walker, Hanneman and Flatman.

In London Mary Beale was a ‘talking, walking’ gentlewoman with her own set of house keys.³² Far from confining herself to the home, Mary went visiting, attended conventicle meetings, and left her own parish to hear other ministers preach. Several Beale circle manuscripts reveal that the Beale home was a sociable place and that Mary's participation in company was taken for granted. In 1662, for example, the Beales' kinsman and friend Samuel Woodforde (1636–1700) began to record in his diary his life as their lodger, including an occasion when Mary painted her parish vicar, the influential non-conformist Dr William Bates (1625–1699), and it is evident that sittings and social events became indistinguishable:

Sept 2^d. 1662. Dr Bates at Our house all this day sitting to my Cosen Beale for his Picture. Signor Pedro came thither & sung halfe a dozen excellent songs.

To which Woodforde added, rather less graciously:

Tis a pitty such a man as hee should bee guilty of soe much debauchery as it is reported hee is,³³

referring, presumably, to ‘Signor Pedro’ rather than to the upstanding Dr Bates. The inner Beale circle was not, by and large, composed of powerful people, but its individual members had significant contact with them. On the 15 September both Samuel Woodforde and his new wife Alice (née Beale, Charles's first cousin) sat to Mary for portraits, he in the company of William Godolphin (1635–1696), a budding diplomat and cousin to Sidney, 1st Earl of Godolphin (c. 1645–1712), who would eventually become Lord High Treasurer. Later, in August 1664, Woodforde described one of the sociable gatherings of ‘Cosens’ at the Beale home that was also the occasion of portrait sittings by two family members:

17 Aug.

Cosen Smith & his wife dined here at a venison pasty. Mr Cook sent the side to Cosen Beale, they stayed with us till night. I am exceedingly obliged to them for their great love.

18 Aug.

Yesterday my Shee Cosen Smith sate for her Picture to Cosen Beale & this day my cosen Mary one of her daughters.

On 28 September, Mary painted Woodforde's portrait and he described the experience in this way:

I sate some part of yesterday & this day to Cosen Beale for my picture, she hath done it very like as all say that see it & are better judges of its likeness then myself.³⁴

It is clear that the ‘paynting roome’ Mary and Charles established in their Hind Court home evolved into the very centre of friendship and patronage within her circle, where existing alliances could be maintained and new ones created in convivial surroundings. In her domestic ‘paynting roome’ Mary could work because she was free from the constraining fear of impropriety, but her setting was both sociable and implicitly commercial.

It was in this setting, in an atmosphere of virtue and virtuosity, that ‘MB’ sat down to write about painting apricots, but earlier, around 1659/60, she painted the first of the surviving images of herself. The Geffrye Museum's Self-portrait with husband and son is also the earliest of her securely attributed paintings. Mary, who was probably expecting her second child when she painted it, and Charles turn inwards towards each other, he looking at his wife over the head of little Bartholomew. Charles has his arms around his son while Mary holds the front of her mantle with her raised right hand and motions towards herself. Unlike her husband, the artist looks towards the viewer with an authorial directness. At the centre of the painting, Charles's right hand is placed on the shoulder of his son in the conventional gesture of fatherly affection and patriarchal lineage. Mary's raised right hand hovers inches above her husband's, and it is the pregnant nature of that small space between their hands that seems to allude to the fourth member of the family who is, at once, both present and absent. The portrait hints at Mary's sense of herself at the end of the 1650s, as artist, wife and mother, but it is significant that she and her act of painting – implied by her gaze, and gesture towards herself – are literally central to family life and prosperity. Beale's own pose brings to mind near-contemporary self-portraits by Lely, van Dyck and Rembrandt, all of which may have been understood with reference to Raphael's Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (1514–15), and Titian's Portrait of a Man (c. 1510–12).³⁵ Mary's Self-portrait and some related studies are evidence that she had already developed at least one complex composition, and was experimenting with a new female mode of self-representation by colonizing an established masculine model. By referencing Titian and Raphael directly or through the mediation of van Dyck, and, more than that, in assuming the pose of the ‘Master’, Beale also demonstrated that she consciously placed herself within the male artistic continuum.

The Beales' social activities amount to what we would now call networking, and the relationships they formed were used to achieve a measure of security, to exchange guidance and support, and to enhance their status by establishing links with figures of authority past, present and future. The structure of the circle mirrored that of more elite groups and employed the same social mechanisms, including the reciprocal conventions of kinship and obligation, and the writing and sharing of literary manuscripts. To have one's name appear in print could be a powerful tool of self-promotion for a woman if the content and context were sufficiently ‘virtuous’.³⁶ One had to choose one's subject carefully and manage the process of publication cautiously. In 1667 Samuel Woodforde published his Paraphrase upon the Psalms of David and included in it versions of four of the Psalms (13, 52, 70 and 130) credited to ‘M.M.B.’ or ‘M^m.M.B.’. In his preface, however, Woodforde revealed that ‘M.M.B.’ was:

that absolutely compleat Gentlewoman […] the truly vertuous Mrs. Mary Beale, amongst whose least accomplishments it is, that she has made Painting and Poesy which in the Fancies of others had only before a kind of likeness, in her own to be really the same. The Reader I hope will pardon this publick acknowledgement which I make to so deserving a person.³⁷

Mary Beale's pseudonymous first and, as far as we know, only foray into print was, I suggest, part of a strategy calculated to create a public persona. Mary had to present herself or, as in this case, have someone else present her, as a modest woman who allowed her work to become the object of scrutiny only through the urging of others, and in the hope of achieving some greater good. One means of creating this reputation was through having her name published as an author, or as the subject of commendation, in godly or other respectable works in both manuscript and print. The status of those associated with Mary's name in print, and of the recipients of her work in manuscript was, as we shall see, of crucial importance. It was a reciprocal arrangement, as her status was in turn reflected on those who, like Woodforde and Sanderson, commended her name. When Woodforde included Beale's verses with his own, it was in the knowledge that her name and talent had already been commended in print by Sir William Sanderson. This commendatory form of activity was used in Mary's fashioning of a public reputation that would simultaneously attract artistic patrons, and deflect accusations of impropriety.

The mid-1660s were troubled times in London. Charles found that his place at the Patents Office was less secure than he had hoped, and in 1665 his name abruptly disappeared from official records of Hind Court inhabitants. Lack of employment and the outbreak of plague were probably the catalysts that persuaded the Beales and Woodforde to retire to Allbrook, in rural Hampshire, for the next five years. More than eighty surviving letters written from London to the couple at Allbrook attest to the fact that the Beale circle's mutually self-promotional activities continued, even during this period of self-imposed exile, and it was there that Mary created the next page of her ‘memoir’. In her Self-portrait (National Portrait Gallery, London) of around 1666, Beale looks, once more, directly at the viewer. Here, Mary's actual roles as both parent and artist are more specifically alluded to by the presence of a painter's palette hanging on the wall beside her, and of a small unframed canvas portrait of her two sons, upon which her right hand rests, and thus the connection between the ‘fruits’ of her womb, talent, marriage and industry is made more explicit. However, in this painted statement of intent, in an act of quiet subversion, the absence and presence of her family has become entirely symbolic, while her visual persona is that of the artist, alone in a ‘paynting roome’ of her own. Far from questioning the viability of motherhood and creativity co-existing in a woman's world, the portrait offers a conclusive example of just such a possibility. On another level, for a general audience, the Allbrook self-portrait may have represented an impressive advertisement for her talent all wrapped up in a suitably maternal and reassuring image.

Unsurprisingly, following a protracted period of strife and division, the definition of friendship became a popular literary theme in England, and one of the most revealing chapters of Mary's unwritten autobiography is her prose ‘Discourse on Friendship’ (1666).³⁸ To Mary, true friendship is a synonym for all social alliances, and its correct practice has a direct bearing on the future ‘good of Mankind’. Within marriage, friendship even has the power to restore a wife to the position of ‘equal dignity and honour’ with her husband which was lost after the Fall. As well as attending to both Christian and classical ideas on friendship, Beale's ‘Discourse’ distils and quantifies it, describing the nitty-gritty detail of how friends should conduct themselves, including the important business of selecting one another. Friendship is hard work and can only be entered into by those who are willing to examine, ‘strive against and restrain’ their ‘owne imperfections’ while freeing themselves from the constraints of distrust and self-interest.

In 1666 Mary sent a manuscript copy of her ‘Discourse’ to her friend Elizabeth Tillotson. Elizabeth was married to John, an ascendant cleric who was destined to become Archbishop of Canterbury and a very influential patron for Mary. Around 1667 the same essay ‘by Mris. Mary Beale’ was copied into a commonplace book belonging to Charles Crompton (b. 1618–d. by 1669).³⁹ Crompton was probably the son of Frances Crofts, daughter of Sir John Crofts of Little Saxham, in Suffolk, and her husband Sir John Crompton, Chirographer of the Fines. Charles was born at Little Saxham, less than two miles from Mary's childhood home, and in his book the ‘Discourse’ sits alongside works of poetry and drama by prominent contemporary male writers including Flatman, Abraham Cowley, Sir John Denham and Roger Boyle, 1st Earl of Orrery. Mary's dedicatory letter to Elizabeth clearly portrays the essay as the expression of genuine affection and of an intellectual, spiritual preoccupation with the nature of friendship but, in the early modern context, such a gift also placed on the recipient an obligation to reciprocate according to the conventions of courtesy. Viewed in these contexts, and in light of the status of its recipients, the ‘Discourse’ manuscripts – like the other gifts and exchanges within the Beale circle – should be viewed as complex instruments of friendship, literary endeavour and professional advancement.

In 1670/71 the Beales took their chances in London for a second time, rented a house on Pall Mall and set up Mary's professional painting studio. On the face of it Beale made an overnight transition from domestic, amateur painter to professional artist offering her talent to the paying public. In reality, however, Mary's apparently unseemly participation in the public yet intimate business of portraiture had been made respectable, even generous and virtuous, by its association with the more correct feminine occupations of wife and mother. A virtuous reputation had been carefully refined by associating Mary's name with religious literature and the offices of Christian friendship.

Susan James has demonstrated that English women were painters and patrons in the 1500s, and Mary Beale was certainly not the only working female artist in mid-seventeenth-century London.⁴⁰ In 1654, the first on Sanderson's list of female artists, Joan Carlile (c. 1606–1679), moved to Covent Garden with her husband so that she could paint professionally and thereby create a ‘fortune’ for their children, but the family returned home to Richmond within two years. A handful of portraits can now be attributed to Carlile and it is clear from them, and from Sanderson's reference, that she too was carrying on some kind of practice, but its nature is unclear.⁴¹ Why did Joan's plan appear to falter, while Mary's later flourished? Evidence suggests that Mary prospered, at least in part, because she had prepared society to accept her work, and partly because the time was right.

Following the Restoration, Puritan restrictions were replaced by a degree of overt social and moral fluidity. Charles II conducted his numerous sexual infidelities without discretion; and some women dared to perform roles on the stage, rather than in the home. Material acquisition was also conspicuous, and cultural patronage came from a widening cross-section of society. When Mary wrote Observations, Charles Beale was a civil servant issuing patents, but by the 1670s he frequented the studio of Lely, the king's painter, and the homes of members of the Royal Society. By the 1680s Charles had contacts of sufficient influence to allow him to borrow drawings and paintings from the royal collection, but also went shopping for clothes for his children and servants, while his gentlewoman wife painted for money. With Charles making pigments, preparing canvases, keeping accounts, and ordering painting and household supplies, Mary was able to paint at least seventy-five commissioned portraits in a single year.⁴² The transition to professionalism was achieved in all the ways outlined above and, in practical terms, by gradually widening Mary's pool of familiar sitters to include those who were outside her intimate circle, but it is difficult to see how this could have been achieved anywhere other than in permissive Restoration London.

Mary's stated aim in all her roles – as artist, writer, friend, wife and mother – is to capture the likeness, the essential distillation of things seen, known and aspired to. Part of the process of definition inevitably involves the translation of one thing into another: turning colour into paint, for example, and friendship into words. Beale shared her preoccupation with observing, quantifying and describing with other members of her circle. Charles Beale was a dedicated observer with an interest in the chemistry of painting, and used his technical experiments to streamline the artistic process. In his diaries Samuel Woodforde was taken up with quantifying both the state of his eternal soul, and the legality of his earthly inheritance. Flatman's pin-sharp portrait miniatures appear to reveal a meticulous and unflinching approach to the creation of likenesses. Empiricism of one sort or another – artistic, literary, religious, financial, technical and autobiographical – pervades the Beale circle's writings and paintings, and through them we are afforded many, more direct, glimpses of Mary.

Mary Beale's own empirical description of painting apricots is deceptively simple, but offers insights into her approach to her work. Observations is in fact a treatise in miniature, a unique description of the artist's experience of visual observation, painterly experimentation and technical refinement. Beale's act of seeing a three-dimensional object, mentally converting it into two dimensions while simultaneously describing it physically in material form, is, in the statement, finally distilled into another medium – words. This three-way metamorphosis culminated in a piece of writing which describes a piece of fruit, a painting, and the complex cerebral and technical skills employed in translating form into line, light into colour, and paint into words. Three years later, when Beale sent her ‘Discourse on Friendship’ to Elizabeth Tillotson, she used portraiture as a metaphor to describe yet another metamorphosis – an attempt to create a likeness of friendship in words:

you may call these my conceptions rather the Portraiture of my own inabilities, then [sic] any true Image of that Divine thing [friendship] w^ch I have endeavourd to describe.⁴²

I have examined some of the pages of Beale's virtual memoir, and some of the methods she used to persuade her neighbours, patrons and the powers that be that her apparently unconventional career befitted a respectable married gentlewoman. The warm glow of parlour-room amateurism and domestic sociability, and the courtly exchange of gifts, were pressed into service in order to make her quiet subversiveness appear reasonable. Ultimately, however, it is the tangible painted and written products of Beale's own self-fashioned metamorphosis that comprise what passes for an autobiography of this shadowy artist. Together with her Observations, perhaps the most telling of all Mary Beale's autobiographical works is her Self-portrait of 1681 (private collection) (Figure 2), in which she depicted herself as a middle-aged woman eying the viewer with a calm but quizzical gaze. Her left hand rests on the back of a spaniel who stands on its hind legs, its front paws on Mary's knee. This is a portrait of a woman of substance at one with herself and her achievements who, eighteen years after recording her Observations, no longer feels the need to declare her intent to the world. This, the final page of her ‘memoir’, is the last glimpse of Mary Beale it is possible to see before history took over the telling of her story.

Figure 2:

Self-portrait of Mary Beale, 1681; private collection.

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NOTES