Unlike both Joan Carlile and Anne Killigrew, Mary Beale was not born into a family with court connections.
Her father was the Rector of Barrow in Suffolk, John Cradock (d.1652). He was, however, an amateur artist, and taught his daughter to paint. Although her talent was not in doubt, Beale’s artistic ambitions were at first confined to painting as an amateur, creating intimate portraits of her friends and family. But in 1664 her husband, Charles, lost his job, and she seems from then to have begun considering painting professionally full-time.
In 1670 she moved to London and opened a studio on Pall Mall. Her rates were competitive, compared to male artists like Sir Peter Lely - what we might today call a gender pay gap - and she was immediately successful. Thanks to a healthy demand for pleasingly colourful portraits, Beale had no shortage of sitters, from the aristocracy down. She carried on painting professionally until the 1690s.
She excelled particularly in painting children and brought to her portraits a greater sensitivity than most male artists. If you want to see anything close to a smile in British 17th Century portraits, you will find them in Beale’s works.
Unusually for the time, Beale advocated equality between husband and wife in marriage. Despite the Bible’s teaching that women should be subservient to their husbands, Beale believed that if a husband and wife enjoyed a particularly close friendship - rare, in an era of arranged marriages - then women could reach equal status with their husbands. She wrote in her Discourse on Friendship that 'Friendship is the nearest Union which distinct Souls are capable of…’