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The Portrait of Mary Mears by Paul Hatch
This portrait is intended to show Mary Mears as she may have looked in 1824, just after the birth of her son James. At that time photography had not been invented so there are no photographs or drawings of Mary from that period. To create this picture I have used available information, which is as follows. Mary Mears was very poor and by the time she was 25 she had three children to clothe and feed. Her occupation was laundress and that was hard manual labour covering about 72 hours a week. For these reasons it is unlikely that Mary would have been fat. The typical build of working class people in their 20’s during the 19th century was slim, but often with strong muscles. I have given Mary a hairstyle typical of most English women of the early 1800’s. Her dress is a style worn by working class women of that time and this would have been a dark colour such as blue, brown or black. The dress of a working class woman would have been covered by a white sleeveless smock or apron with either a square or rounded neck. The bonnet she is wearing in the sketch within the book has been taken from contemporary drawings. The most important part of the portrait is Mary’s face and I have based this upon photographs of some of her closest descendents. These are her son James, her grandson Charles, her granddaughter Martha and two of her great granddaughters, Amelia and Eliza, the two eldest daughters of Charles. The features of James were rather different from those of the others so he probably resembled his father more than his mother. However, the shape of his mouth was typical of the Mears side of the family. The two grandchildren give the best clues as to the appearance of Mary. Charles was the son of James, and Martha was the daughter of Mary’s first child, John. As John and James had different fathers, the common features shared by their children are most likely to have come from Mary. There are several similarities in the features of Charles and Martha and these can also be seen in the features of Amelia and Eliza. Using all these common features I was able to build up a portrait, which should be close to the way Mary actually looked. I first used the profile of Amelia as the base upon which to start. This gave a slim face with high cheekbones, which is a typical Mears characteristic. I then increased the jaw line slightly to match those of Charles and Martha. The downward curving mouth with thin lips is a Mears feature, which appeared on all the photographs I used. The shape of the nose is that of both Charles and Martha, which is not quite as slim as those of Amelia and Eliza. The eyes and eyebrows follow the same shape as those of Charles, Martha, Amelia and Eliza. Only James had different shaped eyes. With all these features included in the portrait, I finally made a few minor adjustments, mainly by shading, to give the finished portrait an appearance to match all the photographs I used. It shows a 25-year-old woman with typical Mears characteristics, and is probably as close to the way Mary Mears looked, as we are ever likely to get. |
