F.M.H. Boy with Cat Niche Painting after Gerrit Dou

Mary Heber Watercolours 1830s

This picture forms part of a fine collection of works that we have for sale attributed to Mary Heber (1787–1846) of Hodnet Hall in Shropshire. Many of the pictures are initialled M.H., and the collection includes an engraving of Mary's brother, the Bishop of Calcutta, Reginald Heber (1783–1826). The works date from the 1830s, after the death of Mary's first husband, Rev. Charles Cowper Cholmondeley, Rector of Hodnet, Shropshire, in 1831 and before her second marriage, to Rev. Samuel Herrick Macaulay in 1841.

Mary Heber was from a wealthy and learned family. Her father was the cleric and landowner Rev. Reginald Heber (d.1804), who was a man of some intellectual power and who had been a fellow and tutor of Brasenose College, Oxford. Her brother was the celebrated English bishop, traveller, man of letters and hymn-writer, Reginald Heber (1783–1826), who became Bishop of Calcutta; and her half brother, Richard Heber (1773–1833), was a book-collector, who amassed a superb library estimated at nearly 150,000 volumes.

Mary herself clearly had considerable artistic talent, and she is described as 'a capable, even formidable woman' in the biography of her granddaughter, the novelist Mary Cholmondeley). On the death of her husband in 1831 the family had to leave the rectory, and in 1833 on the death of her brother Richard, Mary Heber inherited the greatly indebted Hodnet Hall for her lifetime. Mary sold the celebrated library and succeeded in virtually freeing the estate from debt by her own death in 1846. Her three granddaughters, Mary, Victoria and Hester, were all talented artists who, it seems, inherited their aptitude from their grandmother.