Mary Martha Pearson was an English portrait painter.
Life
She was born on 18 June 1798 in Birchin Lane in the City of London, daughter of Robert Dutton, a bookseller who also ran a circulating library in Gracechurch Street, and his wife Martha, daughter of John Comberbach of Haughton Hall. She had lessons with a drawing-master called Lewis. From 1813 she made copies from the old masters in the gallery of the British Institution in Pall Mall, and in 1815 was awarded a gold medal by the Institution for her copy of Claude's The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba. This copy, and one of Titian's Daughter, were then hung alongside the originals. In 1817 she married Charles Pearson, who later became the solicitor to the City of London and a member of parliament. Following her marriage, she continued her study of the old masters, as well as painting portraits and some landscapes. She won silver medals for views of the Rhine, and of Bodiam Castle. She exhibited 31 works, almost all portraits, at the Royal Academy between 1821 and 1842. She was an early member of the Society of British Artists, and exhibited 37 works at their gallery in Suffolk Street. Reviewing her portrait of Lady Mostyn, shown there in 1834, the critic of Arnold's Magazine of the Fine Arts said
The portraits by Mrs. Pearson have ever an air of identity about them, and in the opinion of many, this, after all, in portraiture, is the only quality that the artist need to be so very solicitous to produce. The head of Lady Mostyn, however, is worthy of higher note.
When her husband developed a site in Westminster, on the south side of St James's Park, the block of buildings constructed included both offices for himself, and a studio and gallery for his wife. She painted numerous portraits of leading figures in the Corporation of London, including several Lord Mayors. The Times, reviewing her painting of one of them, William Taylor Copeland, shown at the Royal Academy in 1836, said that, in the light of her civic portraits, "the least the Corporation of London could do, would be to present the fair delineator of their well-fed countenances with the freedom of the city, emblazoned on a rosewood palette". She did not show work at any of the major London exhibitions after 1842. In 1844 she presented a portrait of Lord Chief Justice Denman to the Corporation of London. According to a report in The Athenæum Journal, at the time, her accompanying letter announced it as "the last picture of that magnitude which it is her intention to undertake." Her sister, a miniature painter showed portraits of her at the Royal Academy in 1834 and 1852. She had a daughter, Mary Dutton Pearson. She died on 15 April 1871, aged 72, at Brighton, and was buried with her husband in a large sarcophagus tomb at West Norwood Cemetery.
Subjects
Her portrait subjects included:
Miss Smithson of Drury Lane Theatre in the character of Ellen in the Falls of the Clyde.
Sir James Shaw, Chamberlain of the City of London, "as he appeared in the act of presenting the freedom of the city, in a gold box, to the Earl Grey, in the Court of Common Council"..
