English Baroque Era Painter, 1633-1699 was an English portrait painter. She became one of the most important portrait painters of 17th century England, and has been described as the first professional female English painter. Beale was born in Barrow, Suffolk, the daughter of John Cradock, a Puritan rector. Her mother, Dorothy, died when she was 10. She married Charles Beale, a cloth merchant from London, in 1652, at the age of 18. Her father and her husband were both amateur painters, her father being a member of the Painter-Stainers' Company, and she was acquainted with local local artists, such as Nathaniel Thach, Matthew Snelling, Robert Walker and Peter Lely. She became a semi-professional portrait painter in the 1650s and 1660s, working from her home, first in Covent Garden and later in Fleet Street. The family moved to a farmhouse in Allbrook, Hampshire in 1665 due to financial difficulties, her husband having lost his position as a clerk of patents, and also due to the Great Plague in London. For the next five years, a 17th-century two storey timber-framed building was her family home and studio. She returned to London in 1670, where she established a studio in Pall Mall, with her husband working as her assistant, mixing her paints and keeping her accounts. She became successful, and her circle of friends included Thomas Flatman, poet Samuel Woodford, Archbishop of Canterbury John Tillotson, and Bishops Edward Stillingfleet and Gilbert Burnet. She became reacquainted with Peter Lely, now Court Artist to Charles II. Her later work is heavily influenced by Lely, being mainly small portraits or copies of Lely's work. Her work became unfashionable after his death in 1680.   Related Paintings of Mary Beale :. | Morning Mist Rising | Marsh in the Landes | Painting of Mount Earnslaw | Perspective view | Corroboree at night |
Related Artists:
constantin verhout

Neufchatel, Nicolas de
Flemish, practiced mainly in Germany, 1527-90
HORENBOUT, Gerard
Flemish Northern Renaissance Painter and Manuscript Illuminator, ca.1465-1541 Painter, designer, scribe and cartographer. He may have been the pupil of Li?vin de Stoevere ( fl 1463), the only painter of the five artists who guaranteed his admission fee into the guild of painters and illuminators in Ghent in 1487. Horenbout became a versatile and productive artist, painting altarpieces, portraits and illuminated manuscripts and designing tapestries and stained-glass windows. He also collaborated with the nuns of the convent of Galilee near Ghent in making a model garden with flowers made of cloth that he delivered to Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands, at her court in Mechelen. He seems to have achieved a degree of wealth commensurate with his output: in 1503 he acquired a house