There can be no doubt that this unfinished fragmentary canvas is amongst Gainsborough’s most beguiling studies of childhood. It depicts Edward Richard Gardiner, the only son of Richard Gardiner (1725–79) and Gainsborough’s sister, Susanna. The painting was exhibited at Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1906 where it was merely described as a ‘Head’, indicating that previous restoration to present it as a more finished portrait were added somet.mes later. In its present and original condition, it represents Gainsborough's rare and spontaneous depictions of close members of his family.

As reflected here, Gainsborough often used his daughters and his nephews as sitters for informal portraits. He would show them in unusually relaxed situations and use the experience of painting them to develop his own compositions and his remarkable technical handling of paint. Perhaps the most famous example is the Daughters chasing a Butterfly in London’s National Gallery (fig. 1), amongst the most extraordinary portraits of the eighteenth century. In this example, the young sitter turns to his right and averts his eyes from the viewer. He seems reserved, even shy, listening attentively to what else is going on around him. He has tousled hair and wears a grey jerkin over a white shirt with a drawstring around the neck. To the left of the composition is a reserved area of the canvas that suggests a second figure was intended to fill the space.

Sadly, the Whitechapel exhibition does not include dimensions of the canvas, though the perfunctory description implies that it had already been cut down. A photograph of the painting, perhaps originating from the dealership M. Knoedler & Co., is in the Witt Library and this provided both Waterhouse and the present author with the only visual evidence of the painting, though each art historian reached different conclusions. Professor Sir Ellis Waterhouse accepted the painting as by Gainsborough, though he rejected the identification of the sitter as the young Gardiner and dated it to ‘perhaps Bath period’. The present author believed it to be too overpainted to judge but, since its sensitive cleaning, there can be no doubt that the portrait is autograph. Comparisons with the canvas of Thomas Gainsborough’s nephew Edward Richard Gainsborough in the Tate demonstrate that this newly cleaned painting shows the same sitter a couple of years younger at the age of five or six.

A little is known about the sitter. He was born on 19 December 1764 and baptised in St Gregory’s Church, Sudbury on 8 March. He was the only son of Richard Gardiner (1725–79) and Gainsborough’s sister, Susanna. On 9 June 1796 Edward married Susan Harward of Hartlebury, Worcestershire and they had six children, three boys and three girls. Susanna Gardiner (née Gainsborough) owned a milliners’ shop in Friars’ Street, Sudbury and in March 1780, after she was widowed, she sold the property and moved to Bath. There her eldest sister, Mary Gibbons, having run a milliners’ adjoining Gainsborough’s studio opposite the west end of Bath Abbey, ran a clutch of lodging houses. Mrs. Gibbons was particularly close to her nephew Edward and bequeathed property to him who, with his wife, ran similar establishments in the centre of Bath until the mid 1790s. It seems very likely that the Gardiner family visited Thomas and Mary in Bath in the late 1760s and took the opportunity to have this portrait painted. Perhaps, like another of the artist’s nephews, Gainsborough Dupont, Edward Gardiner spent an extended t.mes with the family of his uncle as his two portraits appear to have been painted a few years apart.

Gainsborough often used his daughters and his nephews as sitters for informal portraits. He would show them in unusually relaxed situations and use the experience of painting them to develop his own compositions and his remarkable technical handling of paint. The canvas of the Daughters chasing a Butterfly in London’s National Gallery is amongst the most extraordinary portraits of the eighteenth century. It’s energy and brevity, spontaneity and empathy have rarely been equaled. The teenage Dupont was used in a similar way in a number of oil studies that lead to the famous portrait of a adolescent in Van Dyck dress known universally as The Blue Boy (Huntington Art collects ions, San Marino), a generic youth, dramatic, t.mes less, imbued with strong enough echoes of Van Dyck’s work to establish the artistic credibility that Gainsborough wanted to evoke.

With a canvas that has been cut down it is always intriguing to speculate what the original intentions of the artist might have been. The sitter turns to his right and averts his eyes from the beholder. He seems reserved, even shy, listening attentively to what else is going on around him. He has tousled hair and wears a grey jerkin over a white shirt with a drawstring around the neck. To the left of the composition is a reserved area of the canvas that suggests a second figure was intended to fill the space.

Perhaps the closest comparison with the portrait of Edward Gardiner is the double portrait of Elizabeth Linley with her younger brother Thomas now in The Clark Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. It was first painted in c. 1768 as a full-length portrait and remained unfinished in Gainsborough’s studio for fifteen years. It was then cut down, and the cost.mes hurriedly replaced by threadbare peasant clothes to convert it into a ‘fancy’ picture to sell to John, 3^rd Duke of Dorset. We should perhaps speculate that the intention for the unfinished portrait of Edward Richard Gardiner was to show Edward with his older teenage sister Susan who had sat to Gainsborough for a formal and endearing portrait in about 1758 when she was about eight years old (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven).

Hugh Belsey | May 2021