
Mary Beale
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Mary Beale, nee Cradock, began her artistic career as an amateur in the 1650s. She started to paint professionally in the early 1670s, when, after escaping to Hampshire to avoid the plague, her family returned to London. Charles, whom she had married in 1652, no longer enjoyed the security of his post as deputy clerk of the patents office, and turned instead to supporting his wife by acting as her business manager.
In doing so, Charles was acting against all contemporary notions of married life. Religious, social and medical teaching stressed the secondary role to be played by women, whose place was determined forever by Eve’s original Sin. But Charles had no qualms about his position of apparent subservience. 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’). Mary and he believed strongly in the concept of equality between man and wife, as evidenced by Mary’s ‘Essay on Friendship’, written during the 1660s. She advocated equality between men and women in both friendship and marriage, for without equality, true friendship could not exist; ‘This being the perfection of friendship that it supposes its professors equall, laying aside all distance, & so leveling the ground, that neither hath therein the advantage of other.’ In marriage, she wrote, God had created Eve as ‘a wife and Friend but not a slave.’ [‘Mary Beale’, by Tabitha Barber (London 1999), p.30]
Charles, it is clear, agreed with Mary, and threw himself into the work of supporting his wife. In the mid 1670s, Mary was able to earn the substantial sum of over £400 a year, in addition to the praise of contemporaries such as Peter Lely, whose works she was permitted to study and copy. Mary’s numerous portraits of Charles are thus a testament to the deep affection between them. This example, hitherto unknown, can be dated to the late 1660s/early 1670s. It shows Charles in an intimate, relaxed pose, draped in a brown gown and wearing an open-necked chemise. The characterisation is nothing less than endearing, and presented in a casual familiarity not often seen in seventeenth century English portraiture.
Provenance
“Elizabeth Bentley Collection”, according to a label, verso; American Private Collection.