The Blue Page

 A week or so ago I was asked by the East Anglian Daily Times to comment on the recent sale by Sotheby’s of a Gainsborough portrait , known as The Blue Page, which was being sold at Sotheby's by the estate of the late  American collector A. Alfred Taubman. The painting was sold for £2.26m, within its estimate, but far short of the record for a Gainsborough of £6.5m which was set in 2011 for his portrait of Miss Read.

I was unable to say anything very profound about the work, other than the fact that it is always of interest to Gainsborough’s House to see the Sudbury painter’s genius internationally recognised once again.   What more can one say from the perspective of Sudbury about a painting which is sold from one private collection only to disappear into another after a brief moment in the public eye?  It is to be hoped that the Blue Page does see the light of day again at some stage,  although the last time the picture was seen on public view was in Detroit in 1990 and it was last exhibited in the UK in the 1970’s.

The painting was once thought to be a sketch for The Blue Boy, but it is now believed to have been painted a year or so later.  It dates from Gainsborough's Bath period, and is a portrait of his nephew, Edward Richard Gardiner.    Edward’s mother, Susanna Gardiner, was Gainsborough’s youngest sister, who married a Mr. Gardiner and moved to Bath.  She was a milliner.  Gainsborough also painted a picture of Edward’s sister, another Susanna, which is owned by the Mellon Centre for British Art in Yale (see below).

The picture is an attractive one and it is not surprising it fetched a good price.  Like the Blue Boy, young Edward is dressed up in Van Dyke style aristocratic clothes, despite the fact that the sitters for both works were actually from the merchant/artisan class.  Once again the clothing is a nice shade of blue, a little lighter on this occasion, reminding us of Gainsborough’s propensity to ignore his old rival Sir Joshua Reynolds's strictures against ‘cold colours’ .   

The Blue Boy was of course painted specifically for an early Royal Academy exhibition.  There is no record of the Blue Page making a similar appearance in Gainsborough’s life time, and the work was probably executed simply as a family portrait. The first recorded owner was the Fourth Earl of Egremont,  who was 3 years old at the time of Gainsborough’s death, so presumably the portrait remained in the family for some years after its creation sometime in the 1760’s.

Edward's sister, Susanna