Mary Beale

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Inscribed 'ELIZABETH ADAMS wife of CONRADE ADAMS Esq.' upper right.

This museum-quality portrait is one of the most impressive works by Mary Beale to appear on the market in recent years.

Beale was one of the first professional female English artists and one of the most prolific portrait painters of the late seventeenth century. Details surrounding her life, technique and working practices are surprisingly well documented due to the survival of the diaries kept by her husband Charles, a former Clerk to the Patents Office who became her studio assistant and colourman. Beale began her artistic career as an amateur in the 1650s, but started to paint professionally in the early 1670s, when, after escaping to Hampshire to avoid the plague, her family returned to London. She worked with Peter Lely in his studio, and, amongst other duties, made small copies of his portraits of famous sitters.

The present sitter’s pose as a shepherdess was particularly popular in the 1670s and was frequently used by artists like Lely and Willem Wissing as a reference to innocence and purity. Of particular note is the latter’s portrait of Lady Elizabeth Jones, Countess of Kildare (1665-1758) [Yale Center for British Art].

The subject in our work appears to be Elizabeth Hirst, who was born c.1645 and who married in c.1663 a ‘Conrad Adams Esq’. By the time their first child Conrad was born in 1773 they were based in Barbados, which means the present portrait, dateable to the late 1660s, was painted just after their marriage and before they moved abroad.