Miss Mary Tunaley

Joseph Wright painted Mary Tunaley in Derby in the early 1790s, when the Tunaley family lived near him in the town, and family tradition remembers her as a particular favourite of the painter. The portrait then left England with her. She married Francis Boott, a partner in the trading firm of Boott and Farrow and a cousin of Kirk Boott, one of the men behind the first textile mills at Lowell, north of Boston, and the couple settled in Boston. Their daughter Mary married Samuel Griswold Goodrich, the author who wrote the Peter Parley books for children. The canvas is believed to have stayed in the family for well over 150 years. Mary Tunaley's great-grandson was Guy Lowell, the architect who designed the museum's building on Huntington Avenue, opened in 1909, and in 1951 his widow gave the painting to the museum he had built.