Historian, author and tour guide Martyn Taylor has trawled his archive to find some of his favourite Bury St Edmunds pictures and stories from the past. This week, he takes a look at female artists:
It is quite amazing that Bury can boast of the ownership of output from three very talented paintresses associated with the town.
Mary Beale, 1633-99
Charles Beale, courtesy of Moyse’s Hall Museum and West Suffolk Council. Picture: Submitted
Mary Beale has to be acknowledged as the first female professional portrait painter in the country.
She was born in Barrow, the daughter of its rector John Craddock, and went on to marry Charles Beale, a distant cousin.
Her talent for artwork soon became apparent and she received excellent advice from Sir Peter Lely, the acknowledged court artist of that era.
Mary’s husband Charles, whose portrait she painted around 1680, dedicated himself to his wife’s career and supported her studio by priming canvases, manufacturing pigments and acting as her secretary. In effect, she was the breadwinner. She even had time to produce two sons, Bartholomew and Charles junior.
Her prodigious output of portraits, of which there are 25 now in the ownership of West Suffolk Council, is thanks to a generous bequest in 1993 to its for-runner St Edmundsbury Council, many of these are now displayed at Moyse’s Hall Museum.
Though competing for the patronage of the great and the good with her male counterparts, she never really received the recognition she deserved at the time.
Her career stretched from 1670/1 until the 1690s, when she passed away in October 1699, in London, however her work has since been welcomed by the art-world, receiving the appreciation it merits.
Rose Mead, 1867-1946
Rose Mead. Picture: Submitted
Rose Mead was born at 15 Hatter Street, the daughter of a Bury plumber and glazier.
Rose soon found she had a gift for painting, attending the Lincoln School of Art and then the celebrated Westminster School of Art.
Alas, her father died at the age of 71, leaving Rose as carer for her mother, who died when Rose was 52.
The Bury pageant of 1907 saw Rose’s talents come to the fore, when she became chief costume designer for the pageant. However, it was with her portraits that she excelled.
Two in oils that were completed at around the same time, 1930, encapsulated different ends of society: one her care-worn domestic help, Barbara Stone; the other that of Eva Wollaston Greene, the first woman mayor of Bury.
It was said Rose would stop young girls in the street and offer to paint their portraits. While they were sitting she would counsel them about not marrying, probably because Rose was a spinster looking after her mother.
Rose rarely left her home town, but she did make a visit to Newlyn, in Cornwall, where there was an artistic community, which may have influenced her own skills – certainly a lone visit to the South of France did.
In the last few years of her life Rose lived at St Edmunds Hotel, adjacent to the Angel Hotel, although still painting at her studio at 18a, Crown Street. It was here in 1946 that tragically she was found dead, her neck broken, having accidentally fallen down the stairs.
Her obituary was announced in the Bury Free Press on April 5, 1946. Because of her insular lifestyle, few mourners attended her funeral service, at St Mary’s, on April 2.
A blue plaque to her memory was put up by the Bury Society in 2012.
Sybil Andrews , 1898-1992
Sybil Andrews Banner in the cathedral. PIcture: Submitted
Sybil was born in the flat above her grandfather’s ironmongers shop at 90 Guildhall Street – a blue plaque put up in 2012 by the Bury Society recognises that fact.
Her father, Charles Andrews, had married Beatrice Trigg in 1893 and they went on to have five children, with Sybil’s early homes at Greyfriars, Whiting Street and 117 Northgate Street.
One of her earliest memories was the unveiling of the South African War memorial on the Cornhill, on the auspicious date of November 11, 1904.
Sybil studied at the Heatherley School of Fine Art, where she was influenced by William Kermode, who introduced her to block printing.
She later attended the linocut classes of Claude Flight at Grosvenor School of Art, where she later became the secretary. It was this art medium she would make her own.
While in Bury she worked alongside notable artist, architect and mentor Cyril Power in the Crescent House Studios, on the corner of Angel Hill, and it was he who was to have a major influence on her artistic future, working together for some 15 years, though a purely platonic relationship.
The first public exhibition of her works in 1921, mainly watercolours and pastels, met with critical acclaim, but it was in the medium of lino-cuts she excelled.
Those such as Tillers of the Soil, 1934, and Days End, 1961, are wonderful reminders of her Suffolk background. Surprisingly this exceptionally talented artist worked as welder in a shipyard during World War Two, where she met her future husband Walter Morgan.
Post-war Britain offered few prospects, so they decided to emigrate to Canada in 1947, setting up home in Campbell River, on Vancouver Island. A museum is now dedicated to her there.
In her will she left some of her art-work to Moyse’s Hall Museum. Perhaps, though, her greatest contribution to her birthplace is the wonderful banner of the martyrdom of St Edmund, to be found in our Cathedral, it is silk on handwoven linen. This the only work of art of hers in this medium.
There is even now an academy memorialising her name in Bury – a fitting tribute to her.