Mary Beale and the Business of Painting

Mary Craddock Beale (died 8 October 1699)

Although the date of her birth is not recorded, Mary Craddock was baptized on 26 March 1633 by her father, the Reverend John Craddock, in the rectory of St. Paul's Church, Barrow, Suffolk (see comment, below). Her mother's first name was Dorothy, but her family name is obscured on her marriage record.

Mary Craddock Beale,
self portrait
(Moyse's Hall Museum, Bury St. Edmunds)

Mary’s father may have begun his daughter's training as an artist himself, for the Puritan clergyman was known to have been an amateur painter. He was also a member of the Painter-Stainers Company of London, presenting one of his own paintings ("of varieties of fruits") to them in 1648.

Speculation about other artists who may have contributed to Mary Craddock's training include the portrait painter Robert Walker, who painted the Reverend Craddock's portrait in the late 1640s, as well as the court painter Peter Lely and the miniature painter Matthew Snelling, both of whom lived and worked in nearby Bury St. Edmonds, and who were members of John Craddock's social group. 

Mary Craddock met and married Charles Beale, a cloth merchant, in 1652, when she was eighteen. Like her father, Beale was an amateur painter. Mary Craddock Beale relocated with her husband to London, settling in Covent Garden.

Over the course of the next few years, she gave birth to and buried a son, then gave birth to two more boys. During these early years she must have continued painting, because by 1658, she is well enough known that she is named in Sir William Sanderson's Graphice, . . . Or the Most Excellent Art of Painting, where she is noted as one of four (married) women painters active in London.

In 1665, the couple relocated to Hampshire in order to escape the plague in London, but they returned to London, this time taking up residence on Fleet Street. At about the same time, Charles Beale lost his job as clerk in the Patent Office, and Mary Beale transitioned from painting as an amateur to painting as a professional.

Charles Beale took over the management of his wife's studio, "organizing commissions," recording payments received and debts paid, and "preparing colors." His detailed notebooks, a few of which survive, contain records of Mary Beale's work, her associations with other artists,  and the "business" of art, including the close care needed with her subjects, who needed to be chosen in order to protect her reputation. 

Through her work as a painter, Mary Craddock Beale was able to support her family--in 1677 alone, she had eighty-three commissions (all carefully recorded by her husband in his notebooks). But by 1681, when fashions had changed, her popularity waned, and Beale once again made an adjustment, taking on students, including Sarah Curtis Hoadly.

Beale died in London on 8 October 1699, aged sixty-six, and is buried at St. James's Church, Piccadilly. 

In her work, Mary Craddock Beale focused on portrait painting, working in oil, water color, and pastel, her style sometimes described as "vigorous" and "masculine," a word often used to praise women painters. Her work was also praised for its "color, strength, force" and "life." In addition to her painting and teaching, Beale wrote, including instructional materials, a piece titled Observations, in which she explained how to paint apricots. 

A large body of work survives, as a quick Google search will show. I recommend the gallery at Artnet for a good survey--it currently includes 169 of her works. 

I also recommend Ruth Dugdale's charming essay, "On the Trail of Suffolk Artist Mary Beale," published in the East Anglian Daily Times. There is also a chapter on Beale in Ellen Creaythorne Clayton's 1876 English Female Artists, accessible at the Internet Archive (click here).

Update, 30 January 2021: Since Artnet is a database "for the international art market," designed to "buy, sell, and research art online," the listings vary. Today the site lists 178 "results" for Mary Beale--this is a good resource for looking at an artist's work, but it is not a catalogue raisonné.

Update, 19 September 2025: I recently found the BBC series Britain's Lost Masterpieces, and I've been enjoying it immensely. Imagine my delight when I came to series 2, episode 3, "Carmarthenshire," in which the "art detective" Bendor Grosvenor identifies a portrait of Frances Vaughan, countess of Carbery, as a painting by Mary Beale (not, as previously believed, by Sir Peter Lely). 

Portrait of Frances Vaughan,
countess of Carbery,
now attributed to Mary Beale
(Carmarthenshire County Museum)

A Black British Nurse in the Crimea--and Twenty-First Century Outrage

Mary Grant Seacole, a "Pioneer Nurse" (1805-1881, married 10 November 1836)

On 30 June of this year (2016), after a twelve-year campaign, a statue of Mary Seacole was unveiled at St. Thomas's Hospital, London--though not without a great deal of controversy.

Sculptor Mark Jennings' statue
 of Mary Seacole
(photograph by Owen Blacker)

The story of Seacole and her role as a nurse in the Crimea has been largely overshadowed by that of her much more famous contemporary, Florence Nightingale--and, in fact, much of the opposition to recognition of Seacole has come from various Nightingale supporters and organizations, notably the Florence Nightingale Society. 

It's hard to see why these two women and their contributions have been pitted against one another--except, of course, the belief that there couldn't possibly be two accomplished, notable women working in the same profession at the same time in the the same place. 

The conflict seems to reflect a deeply tinged misogyny--obviously recognizing and appreciating one woman would take away recognition and appreciation of the other. The dispute has devolved to ridiculous levels--including objections to Seacole's sculpture being taller than one of Nightingale near Buckingham palace and outcries over the fact that Seacole's statue has been placed on the ground of a nursing hospital founded by Nightingale. (There is surely more than a little racism involved as well in all of this. One detractor scoffed at Seacole, who in 2004 was named the "greatest Black Briton" by a public vote, saying she was "three-quarters white.")

And, I'll add, as a side note, this conflict seems to be related to the persistent praise of a gifted woman as the "tenth Muse"--something I've railed about on numerous occasions in this blog. Obviously there can only exist one exceptional woman at any one time, imagined as an addition to the panoply of nine classical muses--who could possibly regard an accomplished woman as, simply, you know, normal? (For all my musings--okay, ranting--about all the tenth muses I've noted since beginning this blog, click the label, below.) 

I will let you google for yourself if you're interested in learning more about this "controversy" over Mary Seacole--Patrick Vernon's "Rubbishing Mary Seacole" (The Guardian, 21 June 2016), is a good introduction to the whole sorry mess.    

Instead, I'll focus here on Seacole's full and varied life. Born in Kingston, Jamaica on an unknown date in 1805, Mary Jane Grant was the daughter of James Grant, a Scottish lieutenant in the British army, her mother a free, mixed-race Jamaican woman who combined nursing skill and running a boarding house, Blundell Hall. About her mother, Seacole would later write:

My mother kept a boardinghouse in Kingston, and was, like very many of the Creole women, an admirable doctress; in high repute with the officers of both services, and their wives, who were from time to time stationed at Kingston. It was very natural that I should inherit her tastes; and so I had from early youth a yearning for medical knowledge and practice which has never deserted me. . . . [From her,] the ambition to become a doctress early took firm root in my mind; and I was very young when I began to make use of the little knowledge I had acquired from watching my mother. . . .*

Seacole was proud of her heritage--she is proud of the "good Scotch blood coursing through her veins," and she is proud of her brown skin. She later wrote about the difficulties she faced when trying to book passage on an American ship as she was trying to travel back to Jamaica from Panama:

my experience of travel had not failed to teach me that Americans (even from the Northern States) are always uncomfortable in the company of coloured people, and very often show this feeling in stronger ways than by sour looks and rude words. I think, if I have a little prejudice against our cousins across the Atlantic—and I do confess to a little—it is not unreasonable. I have a few shades of deeper brown upon my skin which shows me related— and I am proud of the relationship—to those poor mortals whom you once held enslaved, and whose bodies America still owns. And having this bond, and knowing what slavery is; having seen with my eyes and heard with my ears proof positive enough of its horrors— let others affect to doubt them if they will—is it surprising that I should be somewhat impatient of the airs of superiority which many Americans have endeavoured to assume over me?

As a child, young Mary Grant received an education from a woman she referred to as her "kind patroness" and more practical training from her mother, whom she assisted in the running of the boarding house and with her healing practice. In 1821, she traveled to England visit relatives. After a year she went back to Jamaica, then returned to England, taking with her West Indian spices, preserves, and pickles for trade, this time staying until 1825. In her autobiography, she provides few details about her trips to London--nothing about where she stayed or how she supported herself--though she does note that her companion, a woman whose color was darker than her own, was taunted by Londoners with "rude wit." 

She returned to Jamaica again, this time nursing her elderly patron and working with her mother, at times caring for invalid soldiers and their wives. (She mentions working at the British Army hospital in her memoir.) On 10 November 1836 (the occasion for today's post), she married Edwin Horatio Seacole, an English merchant (said also to be the godson of the great British naval hero, Admiral Horatio Nelson--according to family traditions, Seacole was Nelson's illegitimate son).

Albert Charles Challen's
1869 portrait of Mary Seacole
(National Portrait Gallery)

Within a few years, Mary Grant, now Mary Seacole, suffered a number of personal tragedies: in two short years, 1843 and 1844, Blundell Hall burned down, her husband died, and her mother died.  She allowed herself a short period of grief, then set about rebuilding her mother's business. She made a success not only of the business but of her nursing skills, notably in the cholera epidemic in Jamaica in 1850.

In 1851 she joined her brother in Panama--arriving in time to experience a cholera epidemic that swept through the city of Crucis--her nursing experience, in particular treating cholera, helped. She assisted the rich, who paid for their treatment, and the poor, whom she treated for free. While in Panama, she also opened and ran a hotel. After returning to Jamaica in 1853, she again encountered disease; this time, authorities asked her to help in treating victims of yellow fever. She treated some in her boarding house, others at the British Army camp. 

In 1854 she was on the move again, returning briefly to Panama. In her autobiography she writes of having been compared to the Greek hero (and wanderer) Odysseus, a comparison she does not appreciate--"Some people, indeed, have called me quite a female Ulysses," she writes, adding, "I believe that they intended it as a compliment; but from my experience of the Greeks, I do not consider it a very flattering one." In Panama, she read of the escalation of the war in Crimea and decided to volunteer her services as a nurse.

Seacole left Panama for England, and although she brought with her "ample testimony" of her experiences, the War Office denied her application to be sent to the Crimea. An appeal to the Crimea Fund, a publicly sponsored organization that raised money to support the wounded, was also rejected. 

Seacole decided to fund herself, though she eventually found a partner, a Caribbean businessman named Thomas Day. Seacole's plan was to open the British Hotel, which she described as "a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers." (It is this description, I suppose, that leads some of her detractors to claim all she did was serve tea and lemonade while she was in the Crimea.) 

She left England in January of 1855--on her long trip, she writes of encountering men she had formerly treated, who greeted her with cries of "Mother Seacole, Mother Seacole!" During a stop in Malta, she receives a letter of introduction to Florence Nightingale to add to the many letters of reference she had received from British officers stationed in Jamaica.

In Constantinople, she was eventually to meet with Nightingale. She describes their meeting in her autobiography: 

[A nurse says to her,] "Miss Nightingale has the entire management of our hospital staff, but I do not think that any vacancy--"

"Excuse me, ma'am," I interrupt her with, "but I am bound for the front in a few days;" and my questioner leaves me, more surprised than ever. The room I waited in was used as a kitchen. Upon the stoves were cans of soup, broth, and arrow-root, while nurses passed in and out with noiseless tread and subdued manner. I thought many of them had that strange expression of the eyes which those who have gazed long on scenes of woe or horror seldom lose.

In half an hour's time I am admitted to Miss Nightingale's presence. A slight figure, in the nurses' dress; with a pale, gentle, and withal firm face, resting lightly in the palm of one white hand, while the other supports the elbow--a position which gives to her countenance a keen inquiring expression, which is rather marked. Standing thus in repose, and yet keenly observant--the greatest sign of impatience at any time, a slight, perhaps unwitting motion of the firmly planted right foot--was Florence Nightingale--that Englishwoman whose name shall never die, but sound like music on the lips of British men until the hour of doom.

She has read Dr. F—'s letter, which lies on the table by her side, and asks, in her gentle but eminently practical and business-like way, "What do you want, Mrs. Seacole--anything that we can do for you? If it lies in my power, I shall be very happy."

With this "blessing," Seacole traveled on to Balaclava, where she built her British Hotel from scrap materials she could scrounge. The hotel opened in March 1855. Seacole provided meals, comfort, support, and care. As a correspondent of The Times reported in September of that year, "Mrs. Seacole . . . doctors and cures all manner of men with extraordinary success. She is always in attendance near the battle-field to aid the wounded, and has earned many a poor fellow’s blessings."

In her memoir of the Crimea, Lady Alicia Blackwood wrote that Mary Seacole "personally spared no pains and no exertion to visit the field of woe, and minister with her own hands such things as could comfort or alleviate the suffering of those around her; freely giving to such as could not pay."

Seacole was the first British woman to enter the city of Sebastopol after it fell on 9 September, taking with her provisions and visiting the city's hospital, where thousands were dead and dying. (A light-skinned girl named Sarah eventually joined Seacole--many, including Nightingale, alleged she was Seacole's illegitimate daughter, but there is no evidence to support such an assertion.) 

Seacole continued her work in Crimea until the war's end; she returned to England, she would later write, "poorer than I left it." She was declared bankrupt in 1856. But when her plight was made known in the British press, a fund was established, raising enough money to discharge her bankruptcy. The fund was supported by the many soldiers and officers she had treated and tended. 

The cover of Seacole's
1857 autobiography

Undaunted, she hoped to travel to India in 1857 after the Indian Rebellion, but fundraising on her behalf was not successful. In the end, she returned to Jamaica after publishing her Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, the first autobiography published by a Black woman in England. 

In Jamaica, Seacole once again experienced financial difficulties. Hearing of her straitened circumstances, London supporters and patrons, including the prince of Wales, the duke of Edinburgh, the duke of Cambridge, and many senior military officers, raised funds for her. 

Although she would return to England in 1870, seemingly to offer her services as a nurse during the Franco-Prussian War, she did not make her way to the front again. She remained in London, dying there on 14 May 1881. 

You can read Seacole's autobiography by clicking here. It is just too bad that if you Google Seacole's name, you'll have to wade through all the crap. Too bad her detractors seem to think that recognizing Seacole somehow damages Nightingale (who herself would attempt to undermine Seacole by insinuating her British Hotel was really nothing but a brothel). 

Too bad more people don't remember the assessment of Sir Howard Russell, the Times war correspondent: "I trust that England will not forget one who nursed the sick, who sought out her wounded to aid and succour them, and who performed the last offices for some of her illustrious dead." His words are now engraved on the sculpture of Seacole.

Why would anyone want to trash a woman like that?

*Update, 15 January 2024: William Dalyrumple and Anita Anand, hosts of The Empire podcast, recently had an episode featuring Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole. Titled “Tale of Two Nurses,” it is available at all podcast platforms, but I’ll link to a YouTube broadcast here.

The guest on this episode of the podcast, Helen Rappaport, author of In Search of Mary Seacole: The Making of a Black Cultural Icon and Humanitarian (2022), identifies the unique role of the "doctoress" in Jamaica. A doctoress was a local African woman who treated sick African slaves in slave "hothouses" (hospitals), often incorporating herbal medicines, "pharmaceutical skills almost," into a "rich and sophisticated range of treatments." 

Sybilla Masters, American Inventor

Sybilla Righton Masters (died 23 August 1720)

I just ran across a reference to the colonial woman Sybilla Righton Masters, an inventor who received two patents. Well, that's not entirely correct--although she did invent a corn mill and a new fabric, as a woman she could not patent her inventions in her own name. And so the patents were issued to her husband.

Patent drawings for
Masters's corn mill

Sybilla Righton was the daughter of William Righton and Sarah Murrell. Her place of birth is unclear--her Quaker father immigrated from Bermuda in 1687, and Sybilla, the second child born to the couple, may have been born there or on her father's new planation in Delaware Township, in the colony of West New Jersey. The first record of Sybilla dates to 1692, when she was a witness on behalf of her father. 

Sybilla Righton married Thomas Masters, a Quaker merchant, at some point between 1693 and 1696, moving with him to Philadelphia. There, in addition to raising her four children, she invented a corn processing mill that produced a corn meal she called Tuscarora Rice. Her mill pulverized corn rather than grinding it.

She also invented a new fabric worked out of straw and palmetto, ideal for making products like hats and bonnets.

In 1712, she traveled to England to obtain patents for her inventions. While waiting, and since she had been granted a monopoly for the importation of palmetto leaf, she opened a store in London selling hats, bonnets, and chair coverings made from her straw and palmetto fabric. 

On 25 November 1715, letters of patent for her corn mill were issued in her husband's name, Patent #401, a patent for "Cleaning and Curing the Indian Corn Growing in the several Colonies in America." While the patent was issued to Thomas Masters, the letters of patent did note it was for “a new invention found out by Sybilla, his wife.”

On 18 February 1716, letters of patent for her process of weaving straw and palmetto were issued, Patent #403, for "Working and Weaving in a New Method, Palmetto Chip and Straw for Hats and Bonnets and other improvements of that Ware." Again, the patent was issued to Thomas Masters, not Sybilla, the letter of patent noting it was for “a new way of working & staining in straw, & the plat & leaf of the palmetto tree, & covering & adorning hats & bonnets in such a manner as was never before done or practiced in England or any of our plantations.”

When she returned to Philadelphia, Thomas Masters petitioned for recognition of "her" British patents, which were then reissued, since the Pennsylvania colony was now approving its own patents. 

Sibylla Masters remained the only woman to have patented an invention until 1793, when Hannah Wilkinson Slater became the first woman in the United States to be issued a patent--for a cotton thread to be used in her husband's factories. 

Slater, too, seems little recognized. According to a comprehensive report issued by the Women's Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor  in 1923, not a single patent was issued to a woman in the nineteen years following the 1790 enactment of the U.S. patent law (10,000 patents were issued to men during those years). The report claims that the first patent issued to a woman occurred in 1809--when a patent was issued to Mary Kries. Her patent was for weaving straw with silk. Most online sites still indicate that Mary Kries was the first U..S. woman to receive a patent.

Over the course of the next twenty-five years, fewer than a "score" of patents were issued to women. 

In 1921, the lastest figures in 1923 report, women in the U.S. were issued 566 of the 37,335 U.S. patents granted that year--1.5 percent.

For an extended entry on Sybilla Masters, see vol. 2 of Notable American Women

Elizabeth Keckley, "Thirty Years a Slave"

Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley (manumission from slavery, 13 November 1855)

Born as a slave in Virginia some time between 1818 and 1824, Elizabeth Hobbs was later to report that, while her mother, Agnes, lay dying, she had revealed that the planter Armistead Burwell, who owned both women, was Elizabeth's father. 

As Elizabeth wrote later in her autobiography, she was put to work at the age of four, serving as a nursemaid for Burwell and his wife Mary's daughter, another Elizabeth, whom she described as "a sweet, black-eyed baby, my earliest and fondest pet." 

She was seven years old when she first saw a slave being sold. As she would later describe the scene, 

master had just purchased his hogs for the winter, for which he was unable to pay in full. To escape from his embarrassment it was necessary to sell one of the slaves. Little Joe, the son of the cook, was selected as the victim. His mother was ordered to dress him up in his Sunday clothes, and send him to the house. He came in with a bright face, was placed in the scales, and was sold, like the hogs, at so much per pound. His mother was kept in ignorance of the transaction, but her suspicions were aroused. When her son started for Petersburgh in the wagon, the truth began to dawn upon her mind, and she pleaded piteously that her boy should not be taken from her; but master quieted her by telling her that he was simply going to town with the wagon, and would be back in the morning.

Morning came, but little Joe did not return to his mother. Morning after morning passed, and the mother went down to the grave without ever seeing her child again. One day she was whipped for grieving for her lost boy. Colonel Burwell never liked to see one of his slaves wear a sorrowful face, and those who offended in this particular way were always punished. Alas! the sunny face of the slave is not always an indication of sunshine in the heart. Colonel Burwell at one time owned about seventy slaves, all of which were sold, and in a majority of instances wives were separated from husbands and children from their parents.

When she was fourteen, Elizabeth became one of those children separated from their parents--Burwell sent her to the North Carolina home of one of his sons, a Presbyterian minister, whose wife treated the girl horribly, eventually enlisting the help of a vicious neighbor (a schoolmaster and member of Burwell's church) who beat her mercilessly in order to subdue her "stubborn pride." 

She was also "persecuted for four years" by another neighbor, Alexander Kirkland--in other words, she was raped repeatedly; in 1839 she gave birth to a son, whom she named George. 

At this point she was sent to another Burwell, this time a daughter, Anne Burwell Garland. Suffering deep financial difficulties, the Garlands sold off many slaves, but they retained Elizabeth; the entire family, including Elizabeth, relocated to St. Louis--there, her work as a dressmaker supported the entire household of seventeen for two years. 

At some point, Elizabeth negotiated a price for the freedom for herself and her child--$1,200. Then she set about earning it. Along the way, she married James Keckley, who claimed to be free but was not, adding one more to the number of people her work needed to support.

Elizabeth Keckley's customers raised the money for her, the deed of manumission (or should we call it the deed of sale?) dated 13 November 1855 and signed by Anne Burwell Garland:

Know all men that I, Anne P. Garland, of the County and City of St. Louis, State of Missouri, for and in consideration of the sum of $1200, to me in hand paid this day in cash, hereby emancipate my negro woman Lizzie, and her son George; the said Lizzie is known in St. Louis as the wife of James, who is called James Keckley; is of light complexion, about 37 years of age, by trade a dress-maker, and called by those who know her Garland's Lizzie. The said boy, George, is the only child of Lizzie, is about 16 years of age, and is almost white, and called by those who know him Garland's George.

The most well-known events in Elizabeth Keckley's life began in 1861, when she was hired as a dressmaker by Mary Todd Lincoln. The two became friends and confidantes--Keckley not only made Lincoln's dresses, she became an intimate member of the household. After Lincoln's assassination, Keckley traveled with Mary Todd Lincoln back to Chicago, then returned to reopen her dressmaking business in Washington D.C

Mary Todd Lincoln's gown, made in 1861-62,
believed to be Elizabeth Keckley's work,
National Museum of American History

Once she learned of Mary Todd Lincoln's poverty, Elizabeth Keckley tried to help her, most famously with a proposed sale of Mrs. Lincoln's clothing, jewelry, and effects--the sale caused a public scandal, derided as "vulgar." The "sale" did not succeed. Keckley raised money in the black community to aid Mrs. Lincoln.

In 1868, Keckley published her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, claiming as she did so that her motivations were to defend the former First Lady from criticism. The Lincoln family took offense. Mary Todd and Elizabeth never met again.

In her history of the relationship between the two women, Jennifer Fleischner has this to say about the reaction to Keckley's publication:

Lizzy's intentions . . . would thereafter be lost in history. At the age of fifty, she had violated Victorian codes not only of friendship and privacy, but of race, gender, and class. Not surprisingly, the newspapers that attacked Mary Lincoln in the fall, in the spring now leapt to her defense... The social threat represented by this black woman's agency also provoked other readers, and someone produced an ugly and viciously racist parody called Behind the Seams; by a Nigger Woman who Took Work in from Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Davis and signed with an "X," the Mark of "Betsey Kickley (nigger)," denoting its supposed author's illiteracy.

Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley would continue to work as a dressmaker, though she was no longer popular with a white clientele, and as she aged, her financial status deteriorated. In 1890, when she was around seventy years old, she was forced to sell some of her Lincoln memorabilia, items she had had for more than thirty years. 

In 1892, still active, she was offered a faculty position at Wilberforce University, a black university founded in 1856--and so she moved to Ohio to serve as chair of the Department of Sewing and Domestic Science Arts. 

Keckley suffered a stroke just a year after taking up this position and returned to Washington D.C. Little is known about her later years, but she was living in a small room in the basement of the National Home for Destitute Colored Women and Children, an institution descended from the Contraband Relief Association Keckley had founded in 1862, with help from the Lincolns, in order to provide food, clothing, and support for freed slaves and sick and wounded soldiers.

Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley died in May 1907. The exact date is unknown. 

Elizabeth Keckley's autobiography is available online at various sites, including both Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive. 

For Fleishner's Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship between the First Lady and a Former Slave, click here.

Update, December 2018: In its series "Overlooked," the New York Times has been writing obituaries for, you guessed it, women who did not receive them at the time they died:

Since 1851, The New York Times has published thousands of obituaries: of heads of state, opera singers, the inventor of Stove Top stuffing and the namer of the Slinky. The vast majority chronicled the lives of men, mostly white ones.

Below you’ll find obituaries for these and others who left indelible marks but were nonetheless overlooked. We’ll be adding to this collection each week, as Overlooked becomes a regular feature in the obituaries section, and expanding our lens beyond women.

One of these "overlooked no more" obituaries is Nancy Wartik's essay on Elizabeth Keckley, published 12 December 2018; to access it, click here.

Lucrezia Tornabuoni: Business Woman, Political Adviser, Poet

Lucrezia Tornabuoni Medici (born 22 June 1425)

Lucrezia Tornabuoni, c. 1475,
portrait by Domenico Ghirlandaio

A member of one influential Florentine family, Lucrezia Tornabuoni married into another influential family, the Medici.

It is possible, of course, to write about Lucrezia Tornabuoni exclusively in relationship to the powerful men in her life: daughter of Francesco di Simone Tornabuoni, a wealthy banker and elected magistrate in the city of Florence; sister of Giovanni Tornabuoni, a papal ambassador, banker, and office holder in Florence; wife of Piero de' Medici, banker and the de facto ruler of Florence from 1464 to 1469; mother of Lorenzo de' Medici, known as "the Magnificent"; grandmother of two popes, Leo X and Clement VII. 

But, as Gerry Milligan notes, "In Florence, a city where there was no princely court to provide titles of authority to women and at a time when women were frequently kept from the public sphere of men, Lucrezia Tornabuoni (b. 1425–d. 1482) exercised an impressive influence over the politics and culture around her." 

While it is true that her "family network" was her "source of influence," Lucrezia Tornabuoni is significant beyond her role as daughter, sister, wife, mother, grandmother.

She was a successful landowner, buying and leasing property, collecting rents, and renovating a hot springs, Bagno a Morba, turning it into a family retreat and a spa for paying guests. 

Her husband sent her on diplomatic missions that required tact and delicacy. After her husband's death, she continued to have an influence in Florentine civic affairs, measured not only by the advice she offered to her son but also by the careful arrangement of her children's marriages, building political bridges and reinforcing links between important allies. 

Her public role was also maintained by her funding of charitable enterprises throughout the city. I particularly like that she helped to provide dowries for young women who petitioned for her assistance and answered the requests of nuns for cloth so that they could make their habits! 

Well-educated herself, she made sure her children were also well educated. She was an important patron of the arts, one recent study detailing her influential role as a promoter of the "visual arts of fifteenth century Florence." 

Lucrezia Tornabuoni,
detail from a fresco in the Medici Palace,
Ghirlandaio

Tornabuoni was also an accomplished writer. Aside from a large number of surviving letters, her works include a religious sonnet (only one sonnet survives, though it is clear from her correspondence that she composed more lyric poems in this form), a series of storie sacre, or verse narratives, retellings of Old  and New Testament stories (including several lives of female figures, for example, Susanna, Judith, and Esther), and a series of nine laudi, or poems of praise, set to music.

Lucrezia Tornabuoni died on 28 March 1482.*

Gerry Milligan's very informative essay on Lucrezia Tornabuoni is available through the online Oxford Bibliographies; you can access it by clicking here.** Mary Bosanquet's 1960 biography, Mother of the Magnificent: A Life of Lucrezia Tornabuoni is out of print, but used copies are available; this is a bit romanticized, but the history itself is solid. I also like Natalie Tomas's The Medici Women: Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence, but it's incredibly expensive--InterLibrary Loan??

Lucrezia Tornabuoni's letters are available only in Italian, but the verse narratives and lyrics are available and affordable in Jane Tylus's English translation, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de' Medici: Sacred Narratives. This volume also contains an extended introduction, with a good biography.

And, by the way, Lucrezia Tornabuoni is a foremother of a woman we have met before, Caterina de' Medici, who ultimately became queen and regent of France. Lucrezia is Caterina's great-great-grandmother.

*In my original post, I inadvertently repeated Tornabuoni's birth date here instead of giving her date of death--this post has now been updated, thanks to antoniafiorenza's observation!

**And thanks to Alexandra Lawrence for her correction to my spelling of Gerry Milligan's name!

Madam C. J. Walker, American Entrepreneur

Sarah Breedlove, "Madam C. J. Walker" (died 25 May 1919)

Born in Louisiana on 23 December 1867, Sarah Breedlove was the first child of her parents, Owen and Minerva Anderson Breedlove, who had been enslaved, to be born into freedom. Orphaned at the age of six or seven (accounts differ), Sarah Breedlove worked with her sister in the cotton fields and, at age fourteen, she married, as she said, to avoid the mistreatment she suffered at the hands of a brother-in-law.

Sarah Breedlove, Madam C. J. Walker,
c. 1805-19

After the death of her husband in 1887, Breedlove moved to St. Louis to join her three brothers, who owned a barber shop. There she worked as a washerwoman, and although she made very little, she used what money she had to provide an education for her daughter A'Leilia, who had been born in 1885.

Suffering from a series of scalp ailments, Breedlove began experimenting with a number of hair products, some commercially produced and some home remedies. Eventually she moved to Denver, married Charles Joseph Walker, founded her own company, the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company, and started production of her own line of products, including Madam Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower. 

While she became a very wealthy woman, Sarah Breedlove also contributed to numerous social and educational causes, including the YMCA, the NAACP anti-lynching campaign, and the National Association of Colored Women, among others. For a focus on her philanthropic work, you can read the entry on Madam C. J. Walker, part of the Philanthropy Hall of Fame at the Philanthropy Roundtable website, by clicking here. There is also excellent entry for Walker at the National Women's History Museum website, which you can access by clicking here.

There are many good biographies, including some for young readers, but you might want to start with the biography written by Sarah Breedlove Walker's great-great granddaughter, A'Leilia Bundles, On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker.

By the way, although she is much less well known than Madam C. J. Walker, the American businesswoman Annie Malone offered Sarah Breedlove an important model of entrepreneurship and social conscience--Breedlove began her hair-care career selling Annie Malone's products, designed specifically for African-American women. Like Breedlove, Malone was also a noted philanthropist, her production plant offering the local community facilities for a variety of religious and educational purposes. Malone also became an important contributor to the YMCA, Howard University, and the St. Louis Colored Orphans Home. to learn more about Annie Malone, you can start by clicking here.

Update, 1 August 2018: Octavia Spencer will be starring in a limited-series drama about the life of Madam C. J. Walker for Netflix. The series is based on the biography by Walker's granddaughter, On Her Own Ground (mentioned above). The drama will be produced by SpringHill Entertainment, the company belonging to LeBron James.