User:Queenellie/Joanna Mary Boyce

Joanna Mary Boyce Joanna Mary Boyce(1831-1861) was a British painter of portraits, historical and literary subjects. She was the sister of watercolorist and landscape painter George Price Boyce. Both George and Joanna were friendly with and associated themselves with the Pre-Raphaelites. She was born in Maidi Hill, London on the 7th of December 1831. Her family was prosperous, her father was a pawnbroker and a former wine merchant. She was the third of five children.

Death: A Talent Lost Joanna passed on July 15th 1861 from complications after the birth of her third child, Joanna Margaret. While she lay on her deathbed Joanna asked for her nurse to hold a glass so that she could see the sick room. She was most likely thinking and planning for a new painting of that subject. After her death George and husband Henry both asked artists(painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti  and sculptor  John Henry Foley) to make likenesses. NUNN Joanna's writings revealed many plans for paintings that would never be realized. A tremendous talent was lost and a promising career cut short with the loss of her young life at the age of 29. Sidney also passed only a few years after his mother at the age of ten. Their early deaths were undoubtedly a traumatic transition for the entire family.

Pre-Raphaelite writer and critic William Michael Rossetti (brother of Dante Gabriel Rossetti )shared his thoughts on Joanna's passing many years after her death: 'All the artists whom I best knew and valued deplored her death as a real loss to art', he wrote in 1906; 'they had looked upon her as the leading hope for painting in the hands of a woman' Nunn