Mary (Ross) Beale
Mary’s marriage to John Beale (1730-1771) in 1762 situated her on East Bay Street near the city’s fashionable center. She died a few days after the birth of a daughter, Mary Hannah, on November 29, 1771.
ARTIST: John Wollaston (active 1733-1767) was an English artist who worked in the American Colonies in the decades preceding the American Revolution. His father, also John Wollaston (d.1749), was a portrait painter as well. In addition to presumably studying with his father, Wollaston also received training from Joseph van Aken (d.1749), a painter who specialized in the depiction of fabrics in the paintings of others. Allan Ramsay (1713-1784) was another artist who painted in that style. Wollaston’s earliest documented painting is of the evangelist George Whitfield (1714-1770) painted in London about 1742 and in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG UK 131).
In 1749 Wollaston crossed the Atlantic and landed in New York where he began painting portraits in the fashionable London style. In 1752 he left New York for Philadelphia, and the following year he set up his easel in Annapolis. He spent about two years in Maryland and another two years in Virginia, completing about one hundred and twenty portraits. By the end of the decade he had returned to Philadelphia.
Wollaston arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1765, probably after a period painting in the Caribbean Colonies. Painting in Charleston had been dominated to that point by the work of Jeremiah Theus (1716-1774); Wollaston’s arrival breathed new life into the city’s portraiture.
Wollaston was prolific, completing upwards of two hundred portraits during his time in the Colonies. His work influenced a generation of American artists, including John Hesselius (1728-1778) and Benjamin West (1738-1820).
FRAME: Original carved and gilt cypress frame, by microanalysis. The frame was carved in Charleston to match the British frame used for the companion portrait of her husband, John Beall.
STRETCHER: Eastern white spruce, by microanalysis.
RELATED WORKS: The MESDA collection is home to five works by John Wollaston: Portraits and portrait miniatures of John Beale and his wife Mary (Ross) Beale (MESDA acc. 3049, 3050, 3809.1-2); and a portrait of Daniel Ward (3351).
REFERENCES: “John Wollaston” in the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalog
Carolyn J. Weekley, “Painters and Paintings in the Early American South” (Williamsburg, Virginia: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and Yale University Press, 2013)
DESCRIPTION: Half length portrait of a woman facing forward, wearing a four-strand pearl necklace and pearl decoration in her hair and on her dress. One hand is posed behind her waist and her other hand fingers the pearl dress decoration at the bosom of her gray-blue damask dress trimmed with lace and ribbon.