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, ...