Fruit of Friendship

Fruit of Friendship:

Portraits by Mary Beale

From 25th April until 19th July 2024

Mondays to Fridays, from 9.30am until 6pm. No booking required.

Mary Beale (1633-1699) was one of Britain’s first professional woman artists. Our exhibition Fruit of Friendship: Portraits by Mary Beale, features twenty-five of her works from public and private collections. The exhibition spans her entire career and includes self-portraits, portraits of her family and friends, and formal commissions.

The exhibition sheds light on Beale’s studio practice and highlights its radical reversal of conventional gender roles for the period. Beale’s husband Charles dedicated himself to his wife’s career and supported her studio diligently by priming canvases, manufacturing pigments, and recording business in a series of notebooks. The exhibition presents a broad selection of works not seen in public before, including an early re-discovered portrait of the artist’s husband and a portrait of Anne Sotheby, which will be displayed in the gallery for two weeks before it is exhibited in Tate Britain’s exhibition Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain, 1520–1920.

The exhibition is complemented by a comprehensive printed catalogue featuring essays by leading scholars Tabitha Barber and Dr Helen Draper.