Mary Roberts

Mary Roberts was born in England and immigrated to Charleston, South Carolina, with her husband, the painter Bishop Roberts, before 1735. That year Bishop advertised in the South-Carolina Gazette offering portraits, landscapes, heraldry, and engraving services, and he later produced the watercolor view of Charleston that William Henry Toms engraved around 1739. When Bishop died unexpectedly in 1740, Mary was left to support herself and their son. She turned to the same newspaper to advertise face painting and a printing press for sale, and financial distress shadowed her for years; in 1747 a local benefactor, William Watkins, left her fifty pounds for her son's care, and in 1750 a friend bequeathed her clothing and furniture. Despite these hardships, Roberts built a practice as a portrait miniaturist working in watercolor on ivory, a medium previously unused for such purposes in the colonies. Only a handful of her works survive, each marked with the initials "MR." Among them are portraits of members of the Gibbes and Shoolbred families now held by the Gibbes Museum of Art, a miniature of Charles Pinckney in a private collection, and a remarkable set of five cousin portraits from the prominent Middleton family painted around 1752 to 1758, acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007. These small works, typically measuring about one and a half by one inch and preserved in their original gold cases, display an assured technique that suggests formal training before she crossed the Atlantic. Roberts died in Charleston in 1761 and was buried at St. Philip's Episcopal Church on October 24 of that year.