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Overview
Joanna Mary Boyce (7 December 1831 – 15 July 1861), also known by her married name as Mrs. H.T. Wells, or as Joanna Mary Wells, was a British painter and writer associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. She was the sister of Pre-Raphaelite watercolourist George Price Boyce.

Early Life and Education
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 Boyce achieve an early and rigorous education in the visual arts. She began a formal study of drawing by the age of eleven under the tutelage of 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 joined the ladies' class in Thomas Couture's atelier.

Career
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 Maddox 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 skill: "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 miniaturist Henry Tanworth Wells (later a Royal Academician) in Rome. 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.

Final Years
Boyce's painting of Head of a Mulatto Woman (1861, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art) depicted the Jamaican model Fanny Eaton, who sat for several Pre-Raphaelite artists and their circle. Subsequent exhibited works included: The Outcasts, The Heather-Gatherers, Do I like Butter?, La Veneziana, Peep-Bo!, and A Bird of God. This last painting was left complete on her easel at the time of her death.

Boyce died from complications following the birth of her third child, Joanna Margaret, on 15 July 1861. After her death, Dante Gabriel Rossetti described her as "a wonderfully gifted woman" [no citation]; another obituarist called her a genius.

Legacy
Though Boyce’s reputation was somewhat constrained by her early death, Boyce’s art has been highlighted in exhibitions up until the present day. One early posthumous exhibition was held in the Tate in 1935. Select artworks by Boyce, along with portraits by and of other women significant to the Pre-Raphaelite movement, were exhibited in London’s National Portrait Gallery in 2019 in an exhibit entitled “Pre-Raphaelite Sisters”.

Despite Boyce’s frequently mentioned association with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, later commentators have noted that Boyce was not a simple acolyte of of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The art historian Pamela Gerrish Nunn notes that Boyce also drew comparisons to the Venetian old masters from contemporary critics. Writer Simon Poë additionally observes that Boyce's time at Couture's atelier impacted her work with influences from the Classical Academic and Romantic traditions.

Extra resource to list for external resources: images of her sketchbook from British Museum. https://research.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?assetId=831866001&objectId=730826&partId=1

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Planned Edits - Joanna Mary Boyce

 * Life
 * Add citations to uncited claims
 * Shorten and paraphrase quote from John Ruskin; add into "Reception" section
 * Sections to add
 * Reception
 * Gallery (with organized images of paintings)
 * Subsections for "Life"
 * Early life and education
 * Artistic career and marriage
 * Wrote for the Saturday review
 * would like more detail on her writings, hopefully from another source.
 * End of life
 * She died from complications related to childbirth. [from Apollo magazine article cited in original page]
 * Other edits
 * link mention of Fanny Eaton to associated article
 * link mention of Fanny Eaton to associated article

Bibliography - Joanna Mary Boyce

 * Cherry, Deborah. (2000). Beyond the frame : feminism and visual culture, Britain 1850-1900. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-203-35131-2 . OCLC 823738090.
 * Vigué, Jordi. (2002). Great women masters of art. New York: Watson-Guptill. ISBN 0-8230-2114-9 . OCLC 51031133.
 * Foster, Alicia. (2004). Tate women artists. London: Tate. ISBN 1-85437-311-0 . OCLC 51235636.
 * Barlow, Margaret. (1999). Women artists. [New York]: Hugh Lauter Levin Associates. ISBN 0-88363-398-1 . OCLC 42899919.
 * Marsh, Jan, 1942-. Pre-Raphaelite sisters. Funnell, Peter, 1956-, Gere, Charlotte,, Nunn, Pamela Gerrish,, Smith, Alison, 1962-, National Portrait Gallery (Great Britain),. London, England. ISBN 1-85514-727-0 . OCLC 1096471723.
 * Bachmann, Donna G., 1948- (1978). Women artists : an historical, contemporary, and feminist bibliography. Piland, Sherry,. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0-8108-1149-9 . OCLC 4004302.
 * Prettejohn, Elizabeth. (2000). The art of the pre-Raphaelites. London: Tate Pub. ISBN 1-85437-313-7 . OCLC 5958032
 * Durrant, Nancy. "Pre-Raphaelite Sisters exhibition: the women come into the picture at last". ISSN 0140-0460. Retrieved 2020-04-10.
 * The Boyce papers : the letters and diaries of Joanna Boyce, Henry Wells and George Price Boyce. Bradbury, Susan Miller,. Woodbridge, Suffolk. ISBN 1-78327-050-0 . OCLC 1022511769.