ary Ann Alabaster, known as Mrs Criddle after her marriage in 1836, was born in London in 1805, her parents Charles and Mary being in the straw-hat business. She was schooled privately in Colchester, where the girl’s enthusiasm for drawing was not encouraged. Her father’s death in 1818 put an end to her formal education, as her mother’s focus went on maintaining the family business in Piccadilly, whereupon Mary Ann endeavoured to teach herself to draw and paint. She finally persuaded her mother to let her train, studying with John Hayter from 1824 to '26. In this pre-Victorian era, the Society of Arts was the most influential body for nurturing talent and, as Miss Mary Ann Alabaster, she drew attention by winning the Society’s silver palette in 1826, silver medal in 1827 and gold medal in 1828 and 1832, for portraiture, copying and original composition.
Detail from The Artist's Room.
She began to exhibit in 1830: over the years, her work appeared at the British Institution, the Royal Academy, the Old Watercolour Society, the Society of British Artists and the Winter Exhibition; also in the Manchester Treasures of Fine Art exhibition in 1855 and the International Exhibition of 1862. On the deaths of her mother in 1838 and her brother and sister-in-law in 1840, she and her husband Harry (a hatter, like her father) took on the care and support of her three nephews. She then had one son of her own in 1844.
Despite her domestic responsibilities, in 1843 Mrs Criddle entered the competitions for the decoration of the new Houses of Parliament, submitting a 9’ by 12’ composition drawn from Spenser’s Epithalamium. Although this did not win her a commission, it indicates a self-confidence, ambition and the determination to be noticed that can also be inferred from the frequently large scale of her canvases at a time when women artists were widely expected to be loath to draw attention to themselves. In 1846, she turned to watercolour, having been advised that oil painting was unhealthy (a common notion at the time, often used to deter women from painting), and sought tuition from the artist Sarah Setchell. She became an associate member of the Old Watercolour Society in 1849, only the ninth woman to be elected since its inception in 1804. Whether in oil or watercolour, Criddle generally produced figure compositions, sometimes genre pieces but more often drawn from literature. In his history of the OWS, Roget described her work thus: “She was one of the group of artists of her sex who had higher aspirations than to delineate flowers, fruit, and birds’ nests. Like the Misses Sharpe, she painted subject pictures, chiefly in illustration of the poets. There were 139 exhibits under her name [between 1849 and 1880]. They comprise many subjects from Shakespere [sic], with some from Spenser and Milton, Thomson, Crabbe, and writers of her own day, as Dickens, Tennyson, Longfellow and George Eliot.” Which is to say, she was quite capable of modernising her practice as tastes changed: early Victorian staples were joined and then replaced by more contemporary favourites in the1850s. In 1852 she became partially blind, but continued to produce new work until 1861. Among her patrons was the Duke of Sutherland, the Marquis of Landsdowne and philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts.
Mrs Criddle’s husband died in 1857 and in 1861 she retired to the Surrey town of Chertsey, but continued to exhibit.
Bibliography
Clayton Ellen C. English Female Artists . London: Tinsley Bros, 1876 (2 vols).
Roget, J.L. A History of the ‘Old Watercolour’ Society . London: Longmans, Green and co, 1891 (2 vols).
Created 21 June 2022