Portrait of a Woman in Blue (previously known as 'Miss Edgar')

Portrait of a Woman in Blue, previously misidentified as Miss Edgar and painted around 1762 at the Colchester and Ipswich Museums, belongs to Gainsborough's developing Bath female portrait style at a moment when his chromatic sensibility was becoming more ambitious. The blue gown is the work's defining visual element: in a period when women's formal dress tended toward the darker, more opaque tones of silk and brocade in blacks, dark greens, and warm browns, the choice of a full blue dress creates an immediate and unusual visual impact. Gainsborough's sensitivity to blue-grey tonalities had been developing through his study of Van Dyck's silvery palettes, and this portrait experiments with blue as an expressive color in a way that anticipates his more celebrated treatment of blue in The Blue Boy — actually depicting a boy in Van Dyck costume — from 1770. The previous misidentification as Miss Edgar reflects the difficulty of tracking the provenance of Bath period commissions through the complex inheritance chains of Georgian family property. At 123.2 by 100.3 centimeters, the three-quarter-length format provides sufficient canvas to display the unusual dress to full effect — the chromatic choice appears almost as deliberate as a still-life, the woman's social identity subordinated to the painting's exploration of a specific and difficult color.

The blue dress anchors the composition, its cool tones set off by the warm flesh of the face and the neutral background. Gainsborough's handling of the blue fabric — painted with fluid, confident strokes that capture the weight and sheen of the material — demonstrates his extraordinary sensitivity to color relationships.