Miss Susanna Gardiner (1752-1818)

Miss Susanna Gardiner from 1758 in the Yale Center for British Art is an early Bath portrait from Gainsborough's first years in that city, when he was still developing the refined, atmospheric style that would characterize his mature work there. The Bath move in 1759 was the decisive step in his career's transformation from provincial Suffolk painter to fashionable portraitist to the aristocracy, but this 1758 portrait was made just before that move, showing his Suffolk style in its final evolution. The sitter's fresh complexion and natural ease prefigure the qualities that would make Gainsborough's Bath female portraits so sought after, while the handling still carries something of the more careful, precise approach of his early career. The Yale Center for British Art holds the work in its comprehensive collection of British portraiture.

Gainsborough captures the young woman's fresh beauty with developing elegance, using the natural, unforced quality that distinguished his female portraits.