Mary Beale was an English portrait painter. She was part of a small band of female professional artists working in London. Beale became the main financial provider for her family through her professional work – a career she maintained from 1670/71 to the 1690s. Beale was also a writer, whose prose Discourse on Friendship of 1666 presents a scholarly, uniquely female take on the subject. Her 1663 manuscript Observations, on the materials and techniques employed "in her painting of Apricots", though not printed, is the earliest known instructional text in English written by a female painter. Praised first as a "virtuous" practitioner in "Oyl Colours" by Sir William Sanderson in his 1658 book Graphice: Or The use of the Pen and Pensil; In the Excellent Art of PAINTING, Beale's work was later commended by court painter Sir Peter Lely and, soon after her death, by the author of "An Essay towards an English-School", his account of the most noteworthy artists of her generation.

Barrow is a village and civil parish in the West Suffolk district of Suffolk, England, about eight miles west of Bury St Edmunds. According to Eilert Ekwall the meaning of the village name is grove or wood, hill or mound. The Domesday Book records the population of Barrow in 1086 to have been 27, rising to 1429 in 2001 and 1960 in the 2021 census records.