Joanna Mary Boyce

Wells, or as Joanna Mary Wells. She produced multiple works with historical themes (such as Elgiva, which received critical acclaim when it was exhibited in 1855), as well as portraits and sketches, and authored art criticism responding to her contemporaries. She was the sister of Pre-Raphaelite watercolourist George Price Boyce.

The recorded working language is English. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are genre. Work by Joanna Mary Boyce is recorded in the collections of Tate, National Gallery of Ireland, Yale Center for British Art, National Gallery and Tate Britain.

Joanna Mary Boyce, born in Maida Hill, London was the daughter of George Boyce, a former wine-merchant who had found prosperity as a pawnbroker, and his wife Anne. Support from her father and her older brother George Price Boyce helped Joanna Mary Boyce achieve an early and rigorous education in the visual arts. She began a formal study of drawing by the age of eleven with Charles John Mayle Whichelo, and filled multiple sketchbooks as a young teenager. At the age of eighteen she entered Cary's art academy, and afterwards worked under James Mathews Leigh, at his school in Newman Street, London. In 1855, she took an extended trip to Paris, where she studied in Thomas Couture's atelier.

• Illustration — Elgiva (1855), oil on canvas, private collection. Boyce first exhibited her artwork publicly in 1855 at the Royal Academy. Though Boyce exhibited two pieces, it was her painting Elgiva that won Boyce the admiration of such critics as John Ruskin and Ford Madox Brown. In it, Boyce depicted model Lizzie Ridley as a tragic heroine from Anglo-Saxon historical legend, possibly following the precedent of Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais who had depicted Elgiva eight years prior. Following the exhibition, Ruskin praised Boyce's painting: The dignity of all the treatment—the beautiful imagination of faint but pure colour, place this picture, to my mind, among, those of the very highest power and promise. Complete achievement there is not in it as yet... but if this artist, looking always to Nature and her own thoughts for the thing to be expressed, will strive to express them, with some memory of the great Venetians in her treatment of each separate hue, it seems to me that she might entertain the hope of taking place in the very first rank of painters. Following her first exhibition, Boyce continued to pursue artistic excellence through extensive sketching and international art-viewing expeditions. She spent 1857 in Italy, and in December of that year married the portrait painter Henry Tanworth Wells (later a Royal Academician) in Rome.; he had first proposed to her several years before. Boyce used her time in Italy to work on paintings such as The Boys' Crusade and La Veneziana, a portrait of a Venetian lady. In addition to her own artistic practice at this time, Boyce also continued a lifelong practice of seeking out and analyzing the artwork of her contemporaries. Boyce published some of this analysis as art criticism in the Saturday Review, wherein she lauded the "sincerity" and principles of the Pre-Raphaelite art movement, and noted the positive influence of John Ruskin on the English art world. • Illustration — Head of a Mulatto Woman (1861). Portrait of Fanny Eaton

Boyce's later works include Fanny Eaton (formerly known as Head of a Mulatto Woman), a portrait of Jamaican immigrant and popular artists' model Fanny Eaton, now in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art. Boyce died on 15 July 1861, after the birth of her third child. Her last completed painting, A Bird of God, was left on her easel.

• Illustration — alt=Half-body portrait of a young woman in medieval dress, holding a cup aloft in front of her Joanna Mary Boyce, Rowena Offering the Wassail Cup to Voltigern (photographic reproduction), 1856 • Illustration — alt=Painting of a woman in medieval dress embracing a small child, while an older child and a man stand behind her. Joanna Mary Boyce, The Departure: An Episode of the Child's Crusade 13th Century, 1857-1861 • Illustration — alt=Head and shoulders portrait of an infant boy wearing a white bib Joanna Mary Boyce, Portrait of Sidney Wells, 1859 • Illustration — alt=Full-body portrait of a young woman with long blonde hair, in medieval dress Joanna Mary Boyce, Gretchen (unfinished), 1861 • Illustration — alt=Head and shoulders portrait of a young woman with red hair, a white robe, and white angel's wings Joanna Mary Boyce, A Bird of God, 1861