Joanna Mary Boyce

The Departure. An Episode of the Child's Crusade 12th Century

Joanna Mary Boyce (7 December 1831 – 15 July 1861), also known by her married name as Mrs. H.T. Wells,[1] or as Joanna Mary Wells,[2] was an English painter of portraits, genre pictures, and occasionally landscapes. She was the sister of Pre-Raphaelite watercolourist George Price Boyce, and was herself associated with the Brotherhood.

Life
Bird of God (1861)

Boyce, born in Maida Hill, London, [3] was the daughter of George Boyce, a former wine-merchant who had found prosperity as a pawnbroker, and his wife Anne.[4] 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. Her first exhibited work was a life-size head, which appeared at the Royal Academy in 1855. In the same year she went to Paris, where she joined the ladies' class in Thomas Couture's atelier.[5]

She spent 1857 in Italy, and in December of that year married Henry Tanworth Wells, (later a Royal Academician) in Rome. Before returning to England, she painted the greater part of The Boys' Crusade, exhibited at the Academy in 1859. Subsequent exhibited works were: 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.[3]

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"; another obituarist called her a genius.[6]