Charles Beale, Mary’s husband and studio manager, categorised her painting output into three groups: those ‘for study and improvement’, ‘for friends and in return for kindness’, and ‘for profit’. The Beales sometimes used unorthodox materials - for example, painting upon bed ticking for more experimental oil studies - and were clearly mindful about production costs. That the present portrait, which has an air of formality about it, was painted on canvas and has been adorned with a simulated carved stonework cartouche suggests that this was painted ‘for profit’. These decorative trompe l’oeil cartouches are found in many of Beale’s portraits from the 1670s and '80s that were commissioned by paying clients. It was a visual device that was also popular with Beale’s contemporaries, like her supporter Sir Peter Lely. Whilst Lely would have employed studio assistants to paint the cartouches for him, Beale actually paid her own children to paint these same decorative motifs for her portraits.

Mary Lorymer’s first husband, Dr. William Croone (1633 – 1684), was a founding Fellow of the Royal Society and a revered physician. He was amongst the intellectual elite of the early restoration period: a long-standing lecturer with the Company of Surgeons, a young professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College in London, and an esteemed fellow of the College of Physicians. During the peak of his career, he intended on establishing two lectureships, one for the Royal College of Physicians and the other for the Royal Society. However, upon his death his will lacked any provisions for funding these lectures.

The sermon for Dr Croone’s funeral was performed by John Scott, the Canon of Windsor, who referred to the doctor’s widow as “the Truly Pious and Virtuous Mrs Croun.”[2] After a year of widowhood, Mary Croone, as she had become, married the noble writer Sir Edwin Sadleir (1656 – 1719), 2nd Bt. of Temple Dinsley, whose notable accomplishment in life was translating and publishing foreign novels, including a compressed English version of Don Quixote. Sadleir was clearly besotted with Mary for in his English version of Louise-Marguerite de Lorraine’s Intrigues of Love, he wrote: “The first Fruits of my Pen (My Dear) are at thy Feet…if I have fail’d in this Attempt, I shall yet have this honour, to fall a Sacrifice to Thy Self, and the better Sex, and it shall be my Boast that I am such a Sacrifice.”[3] Whilst the funding of such exotic publications might suggest an eccentric passion for a man of limitless funds, Sadleir soon found that his investments were not even in their returns. Come 1690, only four years after marrying Mary, he had accrued debts of £2000 (approximately £420,000 today) and had to petition government to establish a plan to settle his debts via his estate holdings in Hertfordshire. Meanwhile he maintained a London residence on Throgmorton Street, where he and Mary lived until her death in 1706, the same year in which the House of Lords passed the bill, “An Act for Sale of The Manor of Temple Dionisley, alias Dinsley, and other Lands in the County of Herford, for the Payment of the Debts of Sir Edwin Sadleir Baronet.”[4]

Mary Sadleir’s posthumous legacy is that of intellectual philanthropy: her first husband’s formerly unfulfilled intention on establishing lectureships in his name were funded, in perpetuity, by Mary in her will. The Croonian Lectures are still held annually by the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal Society. Similarly, in the capacity of Lady Sadleir left funds for algebra lectures in several Cambridge colleges, which latterly developed into the Sadleirian Professorship of Pure Mathematics at the university.

Beyond her married lives, not much is known about Mary Lorymer’s life, though it is known that her father, John Lorymer, was a successful apothecary in the City of London, where her mother Frances was also born. Neither marriage produced children, so that line of the Lorymer family – as far as we know – and the Sadleir baronetcy died out upon Sir Edwin’s death in 1719. Mary Lorymer’s profile as an independently minded woman during the early years of Restoration London fit that of the typical clientele of Mary Beale.[5]

Mary Beale is renowned today for being the first professional women artists in British history. Amongst other near-contemporaries, including Joan Carlile (c.1606 – 1679), Beale stands alone in having supported her family solely through her portrait practice. Whilst she was not formally patronised by the court, she was closely associated with the leading court portraitist Sir Peter Lely (1618 – 1680), who was, after her husband, her most influential supporter. Beale is known to have visited Lely’s studio often to study his technique, even using twill sacking as a canvas to paint on, as provided by his workshop. Here she painted copies of his work, including small-scale versions, some of which she was asked to do by Lely himself.[6]

Mary’s husband Charles was her most devoted champion and eventually, in effect, became her business and studio manager. The young couple had married in 1652 in her hometown of Barrow, Suffolk, where her father, John Craddock, had been Rector. They soon relocated to the Beale’s property in Walton-on-Thames after Mary became an orphan, only a few days after their wedding. It was to prove an exceptionally happy and successful union based on true affection and friendship as well as shared interests, though it began ominously; in 1654, their first son Bartholomew died in infancy and was buried in Walton. They subsequently moved to Covent Garden, where their second son, also named Bartholomew, was baptised in 1656. It is likely here where Mary’s interest in pursuing a career in painting was cultivated; having early exposure to professional artists through her father’s puritanical connections in Suffolk - such as the parliamentarian portraitist Robert Walker (1599 – 1658) who lived in Bury St Edmunds and likely provided rudimentary lessons to Craddock - she was probably taught the principles of painting by her father, who was an enthusiastic amateur painter and a member of the Painter Stainers’ Company in London.

Around 1660, Charles took over his father’s post as Deputy Clerk of the Patent’s Office in London. With substantial accompanying lodgings at Hind Court on Fleet Street, Mary was able to establish her first painting room. Her early oil studies, such as the present painting, were evidently inspired by holdings from the - already considerable - familial art collection, which included works by Van Dyck, Rubens, and Lely. Her first patrons tended to be close friends who worked within the church or the law, their sittings appear to have been an integral part of the entertainment offered by the Beales and the sitters almost invariably stayed on for dinner with the family. Unfortunately, the momentum of her development was cut short by the Great Plague that swept London in 1665. Coupled with Charles losing his job in the civil service, the young family removed themselves to Otterbourne in Hampshire, where they remained for the rest of the decade. Come 1670, the Beales were offered the chance to lease a newly-built house on Pall Mall by a distant relation. They seized the opportunity as they, rightly, predicted that wealthy new clients would also be moving to the area, which was situated opposite the fashionable St James’s Square. Finally incorporating herself as a professional portrait painter, she quickly became a more economical, and well-positioned option for those who could not yet afford to sit for Sir Peter Lely. Whilst formerly enjoying the role of patron to Lely, who likely painted the couple’s portrait some years before, the Beales entered a somewhat informal tutelage under the senior artist who would occasionally appraise Mary’s portraits and lend her his own paintings to study. Furthermore, they also learnt the business of selling her work as she was soon charging £10 for a three-quarter length portrait and £5 for a bust-length, thus quickly making Mary’s practice the sole source of income for the family.

Charles remained unemployed in the early years of their London return but began intuitively assisting his wife in her rapidly expanding studio. Whilst Mary painted, Charles provided practical support, apparently having no qualms about his position of apparent subservience; indeed, it was a role he took on willingly, and not just because of his deep love for Mary (in his notebooks he referred to Mary as his ‘Dearest & Most Indefatigable Heart’) for he was a skilled assistant and manager. He became a deft colourman, supplying not only his wife’s palettes but other painters’ too. He also primed canvases, manufactured expensive pigments, particularly ultramarine, and kept the books. Charles Beale’s invaluable notebooks record his wife painting his portrait on many occasions.[7] In some she was practising portrait poses, whilst in others different material supports were being tested, from fine linen to coarse canvas. Other painting experiments included trials in the drying properties of pigment layers and varnishes, the recipes for which were of Charles Beale’s devising. His goal was to produce the finest materials and methods, at the most effective cost, for Mary; this led to a most efficient, equal, and profitable partnership for the Beales.

By the mid-1670s, Mary was earning over £400 a year, enjoying the peak of her commercial success; in 1677 alone, she was commissioned to paint eighty-three individual portraits. As patronage from the gentry and nobility dwindled after the death of Lely in 1680, her later works were mostly portraits of close friends and family, affording her more time to experiment, paint more portraits of the clergy on a charitable basis, and continue her ongoing studies of her family. Her last years were spent in their house on Pall Mall and after her death in the autumn of 1699, she was buried in St James’s Church in Piccadilly.[8]

In life and death, she has been highly praised: Sir Peter Lely apparently commented that she ‘worked with a wonderful body of colour, and was exceedingly industrious’, whilst one of her first biographers, Ellen C. Clayton, said of her in 1876 that “the most eminent personages respected Mrs. Beale as a talented artist, an irreproachable wife, and excellent mother.”[9] George Vertue even wrote that Beale ‘was little inferior to any of her contemporaries, either for Colour, Strength, Force or Life.’[10] As the curator of the first exhibition dedicated to Mary Beale’s life and work, held in 1975, states: “…among the reasons for the almost total eclipse of her reputation in subsequent centuries must be counted the male chauvinism of cataloguers and writers on art who invariably attributed her best pictures to other, male, painters.”[11]

[1] Another portrait of Lady Sadleir, as Lorymer became in 1686, now kept at Sutton House, bears a remarkable resemblance to our sitter and provides the basis for our identification.

[2] D.B.J. Randall, “Avoiding Garrulity: An Introduction to Sir Edwin Sadleir and His Improvement of Cervantes's Don Quixote” from Studies in Philology, Vol. 106, No. 4 (Autumn 2009), p. 475.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, p. 482.

[5] Interestingly, both of her husbands were painted by Beale, see Figs. 1 - 3.

[6] Other recorded three-quarter lengths ‘in little’ include a self-portrait from c.1675, a portrait of her husband also from c.1675 and a Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland from c.1678.

[7] Whilst the majority of these have been lost, those for the years 1677 and 1681 survive and can now be found in the Bodleian Library, Oxford and the National Portrait Gallery Archives respectively. However, the contents of four others are available to us in part through the comments and transcripts recorded by George Vertue in his own ‘Notebooks’ which he collated later in the 18th century.

[8] Tragically her tomb, formerly located beneath the communion table, was destroyed during the London ‘Blitz’ in WWII.

[9] E.C. Clayton, English Female Artists, London 1876, pp. 44 – 45.

[10] Ibid, The Excellent Mrs Mary Beale, p. 16.

[11] Ibid, p. 3.