Sarah Hoadly was born Sarah Curtis in 1676 and is recorded as having trained in the workshop of Britain’s first professional female artist Mary Beale. By the time Sarah married her husband, Benjamin Hoadly, Bishop of Bangor, Hereford, Salisbury and Winchester respectively in 1701, she had gained a reputation as a skilled artist and went on to paint the portraits of the Theologian William Whiston and Bishop Gilbert Burnet.

After Sarah’s marriage, George Vertue notes that she painted ‘the pictures only of Intimates and friends’.[1] This is evident when looking at the portrait she painted of her husband while he was the Bishop of Salisbury, now located in the National Portrait Gallery. The painterly execution of this portrait and the direct, albeit informal, gaze of the sitter holds strong similarities with this newly discovered double portrait and allows us to assume that the two works were completed around the same date, at some point in the 1730s.

Sarah and Benjamin had three sons, Samuel, Benjamin and John. It would appear probable that the sitters in this portrait could be one of the artist’s sons with their wife. The fact that Hoadly has depicted the female sitter gazing to the viewer is particularly unusual for the period and is perhaps a fascinating homage to her teacher Mary Beale’s self-portrait which has been executed in much the same way. 

[1] G. Vertue, Vertue Note books (Edited by the Earl of Ilchester), Walpole Society, vols XVIII – XXIX, 1930-55, III, p. 113.