Mary Beale
Pioneering artist, who paved the way for generations of women creatives.
Born in 1633, in Suffolk, Mary Beale was one of the first English women to work as a professional artist, an extraordinary achievement when women were largely excluded from artistic training.
Plaque erected in: 2026
Category: Arts
Location: Allbrook Farmhouse, Eastleigh
Unlike many of her male contemporaries, she succeeded without financial support from a wealthy patron. She also trained other women in painting, and she is sometimes cited as the first woman to have written an instructional text for painting in English.
Many of Mary Beale's works were misattributed to male artists for generations, including to Peter Lely, and her own son Charles. Her first solo exhibition came only in 1975.
Recent exhibitions at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, Tate Britain and Philip Mould Gallery have brought renewed attention to her achievements. Experts continue to discover more of her paintings, correcting historical misattributions.
It is fitting that a pioneering woman has become the first ever seventeenth century figure to be honoured with a national blue plaque. Almost 400 years ago, Mary Beale proved that pure artistic skill could overcome the barriers that made becoming a professional so much more difficult because of her gender.
Mary perfectly represents how talent is everywhere and reminds us of the importance of nurturing those skills in all who possess them. This plaque will be a powerful inspiration to women and girls today
Her father, John Cradock, was a keen amateur artist himself who presented his own paintings in the late 1640s. If Beale had an artistic tutor as a child, it was likely her father.
She met her husband Charles Beale through their shared passion for art, and the couple married in March 1653. Charles had early ambitions to become a painter but proved better suited to the technical side of art, developing pigments and documenting artistic techniques. The couple moved to London in the mid-1650s where Charles sold pigments to leading artists, while Mary painted portraits for friends and family.
In 1664, they left the city with their son and moved to Allbrook Farmhouse in Hampshire for a more comfortable life and to escape illness. This is the only surviving home linked to them and so it is the location of the national blue plaque. While living there, Mary continued her artistic work while also developing her writing. She wrote an essay on friendship to her friend Elizabeth Tillotson, arguing that women are capable of offering wise advice and meaningful friendship, despite commonly held beliefs at the time.
Mary's output was prolific. Throughout the 1670s, she would typically complete between forty and sixty portraits a year. She offered portraits at competitive rates, a head-and-shoulder portrait cost £5, compared to the £20 charged by Peter Lely, the most eminent portraitist of the day. Lely became one of Mary's supporters and invited her to observe him at work.
Unable to market herself as openly as male artists, Mary had built her reputation by giving paintings as gifts to well-connected people. She also cultivated an image as a pious family woman, allowing her to challenge social conventions without being ostracised.
Mary completed her last portraits in the 1690s. She died in 1699, aged sixty-five, survived by her husband and sons.
Set aside, for a moment, Mary Beale’s near singularity as a woman artist in a male-dominated profession. What is most striking is the sheer industry of her portrait practice. Academics, divines, and a wide swathe of the professional middle classes and gentry were captured by her brush through a dynamic family enterprise, with Beale at its centre, her husband working behind the scenes, and her two sons helping to complete compositions. She did for this stratum of society what Sir Peter Lely did for the aristocracy