In this superb portrait, by one of England's earliest successful female artists, Mary Beale, the sitter has been portrayed in a gold dress with a blue drapery mantle gathered and tied in place by a jewelled brooch. Her long brown hair is tied at back of neck and falls in loose curls about the face. The work was painted by Mary Beale, who was one of the first female portrait painters in England; today she enjoys a particular celebrity among the portraitists of the seventeenth century. This is not solely because she was a woman in a profession dominated by men, indeed, she was not alone in this: in �The Excellent Art of Painting� written in 1658 Sir William Sanderson records Mrs Beale among four named women painters practising in London. Rather it is because she competed so successfully with her colleagues, and was so prolific a painter: Additionally, through the diaries kept by her husband Charles, a former Clerk to the Patents Office, who became her studio assistant and colourman, we know more of her technique and working practice than that of any of her contemporaries, including Sir Peter Lely, and this has provided to historians today an invaluable record, unrivalled for the period, into the working life of an artist and their studio. Charles and Mary, together shared a passion not only for painting, but also the research of all the technical aspects behind its production. Whilst Mary executed the portrait commissions, Charles studiously experimented with pigments, mediums, canvases, and other materials that Mary needed'. His goal was to produce the finest materials and methods, at the most effective cost for Mary.The precise details of Mary Beale's training remain obscure: her father John Craddock had been a member of the Painter-Stainers' Company, and had had his portrait painted by Robert Walker in the late 1640s. Walker was then pre-eminent among painters in London, particularly in the puritan circles that included Mary Beale's family, and it is, not u...