Goldbeck, Mary Freeman (1825-1874)

The daughter of respected portraitist and miniaturist George Freeman, Mary Freeman Goldbeck was a poet and a talented painter in her own right, referred to as "a genius in water-color miniatures" (Rawson 103). As Anna Mary Freeman and Mary Freeman Goldbeck, she published poems in The Galaxy, Knickerbocker, Living Age and the Saturday Press. Although her relationship with the Pfaffians is uncertain, sources have described her as a friend of Ada Clare and, in her memoir, Rose Eytinge--another leader of the bohemian community--groups Goldbeck with other "beautiful and brilliant" women who congregated at Clare's home in New York City (Rawson 38, 22). Her husband appears to have been Robert Golbeck, a pianist and composer. She was married in 1859 and, two years later, she gave birth to a son, William Freeman Goldbeck (Keyes, 44).

(See also Shauna Martineau Robertson's biography, Anna Mary Freeman's Room: Women and Art in Antebellum America.)