Mary Hayllar

Alexandra Mary Hayllar, known as Mary Hayllar and later, after marriage, as Mary Wells, was born in 1862 in Mecklenburgh Square, London. She was the daughter of the painter James Hayllar (1829 to 1920) and one of four artistic sisters, alongside Jessica (1858 to 1940), Edith, and Kate Hayllar. The family lived and worked at Castle Priory in Wallingford, Berkshire, where James Hayllar personally trained each daughter as she reached school leaving age, running a daily studio program from ten in the morning to four in the afternoon in drawing, perspective, and painting, followed by evening work in clay modeling, etching, or mezzotint. No record places Mary at any formal art school, academy, or university.

Mary exhibited at the Royal Academy in London from 1880 to 1885, showing mainly still life and child subjects. She is consistently described in dealer and biographical notes as the least prolific of the Hayllar sisters. She married Henry Wells in 1887, though one source gives 1885, and, according to the sources that discuss her, retired from professional painting afterward to raise a family. She died in 1950; the place given in secondary sources is Wallingford, where she is said to have been living with a sister at the time, though this detail rests on a single source and has not been independently corroborated. No exact birth or death date (day and month) has been located.

No verbatim critical assessment of Mary Hayllar herself, from a named critic in a major outlet, has been located. The available characterizations come from dealer and art historical notes rather than contemporary press: Christie's catalogue notes describe her as having exhibited "at the Royal Academy from 1880 to 1885, mainly still lives and child subjects," and multiple dealer and biographical sources describe her as the least prolific of the four Hayllar sisters. Critical attention to the family has focused far more on her father, James Hayllar, and on her sister Jessica, whose exhibiting career ran for decades longer.

No public auction record for Mary Hayllar has been identified in the sources reviewed for this profile as of 2026-07-16. This is not unusual for a Victorian artist with a short exhibiting career and no later commercial promotion; it does mean that any claim about her market should be treated as undocumented rather than simply low. A tennis themed genre work has been cited in one source as attributed to her and held by Southampton City Art Gallery, but similarly titled tennis paintings are more commonly associated in standard references with her sister Edith Hayllar, and this attribution has not been corroborated by a second independent source.

Mary Hayllar has no catalogue raisonne, no confirmed gallery or estate representation, and no documented auction result. Works reasonably attributed to her should be evaluated primarily through family provenance and comparison with the wider Hayllar workshop output, given that all four sisters trained under the same regimen at Castle Priory and produced stylistically related domestic and still life subjects. Anyone considering a work said to be by Mary Hayllar, including the tennis themed painting cited at Southampton City Art Gallery, should independently verify the attribution against the better documented records for her sisters before treating it as settled.