Frances Stovin, Mrs James White Worsley Pennyman (1792-1869)
Mary Ellen Best (1809 - 1891)
Category
Art / Drawings and watercolours
Date
1839 (signed and dated)
Materials
Bird's eye maple, Paper
Measurements
340 x 270 mm
Order this imageCollection
Ormesby Hall, Redcar and Cleveland
NT 707927
Caption
The paintings of Mary Ellen Best create a vivid picture of Victorian domestic life. Best recorded the people and places she knew, capturing the ordinary in extraordinary detail. She was born in York and took lessons in drawing and painting as a child. Readying herself to practise as an artist, she sketched daily, read voraciously on the history of art and visited Yorkshire country houses, such as Fountains Hall, to study their collections. With her mother and a box of watercolours, Best travelled through the Netherlands and Germany (where she would eventually live) in the 1830s, visiting art galleries and museums, and picking up occasional portrait commissions along the way. Best has been described as operating within the constraints placed upon her as a middle-class woman. Although she exhibited, sold and received prizes for her watercolours, and attracted many commissions, she did not take a studio (working instead from home), train apprentices, or display or advertise her work for sale. Despite being relatively prolific (she painted about 40 portraits per year), like many women artists she gradually stopped painting in her forties, following her marriage and the births of her children. The advent of photography might also have reduced the demand for the types of work that Best produced. She is especially known for her portraits, often of friends and family in Yorkshire, and her remarkably detailed, documentary images of interiors – both considered acceptable subjects for women artists at the time. They are object- and pattern-rich: tables are laden with ceramics and glasses, wallpapers vibrate with colour, the grain of pine floorboards catches in the sunlight, and ornaments are arranged neatly in their proper places. Most of Best’s portrait sitters were women. She painted two generations of the Worsley family, including Mary Ellen and her good friend Rose, in the late 1830s.
Summary
A watercolour portrait of Frances Stovin, Mrs James White Worsley Pennyman (1792-1869) by Mary Ellen Best, dated 1839. Portrait of a lady, seated, three quarter length, her dark hair braided and in ringlets, wearing a white muslin dress with fichu and gold chain. Her right arm rests on a circular table. Signed and dated June 1839. Watercolour on paper in a birds eye maple frame.
Provenance
Previously at Ormesby- see note above.
Makers and roles
Mary Ellen Best (1809 - 1891), publisher
References
Conroy, Rachel, Women Artists and Designers at the National Trust, 2025, pp. 106-109