I love going out for a walk around dusk, when people have turned on their lights, but haven’t yet drawn the curtains. You can get a sneaky look inside and see how they’ve furnished and decorated their homes. I think that’s why I was first attracted to the works of this week’s artist.

Mary Ellen Best (1809-1891) was an English watercolour artist, primarily concentrating on English – and later on, German – domestic interior scenes. She was born in York, the daughter of Dr Charles Best, a physician who worked at the York Lunatic Asylum (now Bootham Park Hospital). Her mother was Mary Norcliffe Dalton, the daughter of a Yorkshire landowner. She was brought up, along with her younger sister, Rosamond, in Little Blake Street (now Duncombe Place) near the west end of York Minster.

Best showed artistic promise from a young age, having art lessons at boarding school during her teenage years. As a young woman, she produced and sold many paintings and also exhibited widely.

As well as her own home, Best painted a number of studies of the Norcliffe family’s East Yorkshire home, Langton Park. There are many well-to-do town & country house drawing rooms, sitting rooms, dining rooms, music rooms etc. But it’s the ‘below stairs’ views that I find most interesting; the servant’s quarters, the kitchens and the more modest cottage interiors.

After the death of her parents and grandmother, from whom she inherited handsome sums each time, Best’s artistic output decreased. After she married German schoolmaster, Johann Anton Phillip Sary in 1840, the number of paintings she produced lessened even further until they virtually dried up after giving birth to and raising a son and daughter.

In 1985, a biography entitled The World of Mary Ellen Best was written by Caroline Davidson. In it, she calculated that Best produced over 1,500 paintings in her lifetime. Copies of the book are available at Abe Books and Amazon.

You can also find many more details about life on the Women of York blog and essay, Negotiating Identity: Mary Ellen Best and The Status of Female Victorian Artists.

Additional image credits:
Askart