UK appraiser IDs 17th century painting to Britain's first-known female professional painter, Mary Beale
For hundreds of years, everyone believed a portrait at McMaster University's Museum of Art was by Flemish artist Michael Sweerts. That is, until an art researcher and appraiser from England recently stumbled upon a photo of the painting during an online search.
"The painting at McMaster University came up and I immediately thought to myself, hold on, this isn't painted by Sweerts at all," Lawrence Hendra, associate director at Philip Mould & Company, tells As It Happens host Carol Off. "This is painted by Mary Beale, an artist that we have dealt with here at the gallery quite a lot in the past."
Beale lived from 1633-1699 and is considered to be the first professional female English painter.
"She had quite a distinctive palette," Hendra says. "She often used dark browns, black colouring and I just recognized [the work] through that."
Hendra then concluded that the subject of the portrait was Beale's husband Charles.
"I recognized the face of the sitter and the way that she had sort of left it unfinished, which suggests that it was done in a rather informal manner," he says. "You often see that with artists who were painting their family and close friends. Obviously, had it been a paying customer, she wouldn't have left it unfinished. From then on, it was really a case of putting two-and-two together and that's when I contacted the university."
The university responded immediately to Hendra's e-mail and quickly began the re-attribution process. Tabitha Barber, curator at Tate Britain and a renowned Beale expert, also verified the attribution.
"Beale was really a trailblazer in her day, being a female professional in what was a male-dominated sphere," Hendra explains. "Her circle of patrons were the academics, the mathematicians, the scientists. She did a lot of work with the Royal Society in London, and that circle of the intelligentsia."
While McMaster University's Beale portrait is not for sale, Hendra — who is a frequent appraiser for BBC TV's Antiques Roadshow — estimates its value, in Canadian dollars, at around $100,000.
