Mabel Clark (also known as Mabel Trafford)

As well as passing on his skills to his sons, Samuel James Clark also taught his common law wife to paint. Mabel specialized in small oil paintings of English poultry, often under the assumed name Mabel Trafford. Sometimes she signed her work with the monogram "M T ", with the T running down through the centre of the M.  

Her real name was Sophie Mabel Cooke and, according to census records, she was born in Burton On Trent around 1873. It is said by her granddaughter that Mabel was an orphan. There is no birth record for her but there is a 7 year-old Sophie Cooke recorded as living in the Burton Union Workhouse in 1881. Unfortunately the workhouse admission and discharge records for this period do not survive so her origins remain unknown. Mabel came to London as a teenager to work as a domestic servant.

Samuel appears to have separated from his first wife Maria around 1894, since from this date onward his name is missing from the family's address on the electoral register. Mabel gave birth to a daughter by Samuel in 1898, and the 1901 census shows them living together in Tottenham as Mr and Mrs Clark Trafford. A second daughter had been born in 1900, and in 1903 their third child, a son, arrived. All three children were registered with the double surname Clark Trafford.

Like Samuel, Mabel does not appear to have exhibited her work. It is likely that she sold her paintings to the same dealers that Samuel and his brothers used, hence the need for a different surname, perhaps. As a mother of three young children her output is likely to have been much smaller than Samuel's, and indeed there are not many auction records for her. 

Mabel's career as an artist was cut tragically short when she died of breast cancer in 1914, aged just 41. Although she and Samuel never married (because Samuel and Maria never divorced), her death certificate records her as "Mabel Clark" and gives her occupation as "wife of Samuel James Clark, artist - Animal Painter- ".