Ellen Wallace Sharples

Ellen Wallace Sharples received her only documented art training from the painter James Sharples in Bath, England, before marrying him in 1787. Her birthplace is reported inconsistently across sources, variously as Birmingham, Lancaster, or Bath, and cannot be confirmed with confidence.

Working in pastel and in watercolor miniature on ivory, she produced portraits alongside her husband, including likenesses connected to the Washington family that survive today with varying degrees of attribution certainty among institutions. She and James Sharples were active in the United States from the early 1790s until his death in 1811. Following his death, Ellen returned to Bristol with their children, James Jr. and Rolinda, the latter also a professional painter.

In Bristol, she became a significant civic patron of the arts. In 1844 she founded the Bristol Academy for the Promotion of Fine Arts with a gift reported variously as about GBP 2,000 or about GBP 3,500, sources disagree on the exact figure. She died on 14 March 1849; most sources place her death in Bristol, though one source instead names Wybunbury, Cheshire, and the two accounts cannot be fully reconciled. At her death she bequeathed a further GBP 4,000 to the Academy, funding Bristol's first public art gallery, the institution that became the Royal West of England Academy.

Sustained critical writing about Ellen Wallace Sharples as an independent artist is limited; most published material treats her within the history of the Sharples family workshop and within the institutional history of Bristol's art academies. Museum interpretive materials describe her as one of the country's first professional women artists, a characterization repeated across biographical sources, though it comes from institutional text rather than a named critic writing in a major outlet. No verifiable, exact critical quotation from a named critic and outlet could be confirmed for this profile.

Ellen Wallace Sharples has no meaningful presence in the modern commercial art market. No catalogue raisonne exists, and her surviving works are concentrated in museums and the academy she founded rather than in private or gallery hands. When works attributed to her do appear at auction, attribution is frequently shared with other members of the Sharples family of itinerant portraitists, particularly her husband James Sharples Sr., which complicates any clean read of price history. Available records include a group lot of pastel portraits attributed to Ellen Sharples reported to have realized GBP 2,860 at an unnamed Old Master sale, and a pair of portraits described as attributed to "James Sharples Sr. or Ellen Sharples" that brought USD 15,000 at Nye & Company in a sale of the Stein collection; in the first case the auction house is not identified in available reporting, and in the second the exact sale date and sole authorship by Ellen Sharples could not be confirmed. No verified all-time auction record for the artist, distinct from her family, could be established.

Works connected to Ellen Wallace Sharples rarely reach the open market, and when they do, cataloguing is often hedged, "attributed to" or "possibly by," because pastel and miniature portraits from the Sharples workshop can be difficult to assign to a single hand among James Sharples Sr., Ellen, their son James Jr., and their daughter Rolinda. There is no catalogue raisonne and no contemporary gallery or estate representation; the great majority of her documented output sits in museum and academy collections in Bristol and the United States rather than in circulation. Collectors should treat provenance and institutional documentation, not auction comparables, as the primary basis for any assessment of a work said to be by her.