My Old Master

James Innes-Mulraine achieved his lifetime’s aim of discovering a lost Gainsborough – with not a little help from his Dad.

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I’d love to say that we first saw the lady in the green dress across a crowded auction room. But, when my father and I stumbled across a lost Gainsborough in 2015, it was in an online auction house catalogue – where so many paintings are bought these days. (We work together as a father and son team of art sleuths.)

Dad and I click through the daily email updates from the auction houses. If there’s anything exciting, we ring each other at eleven, when he will be at the gym and I will be on my lunchbreak at work.

One morning, we both saw a small painting at an auction in the West Country. It was a three-quarter length portrait of a lady, catalogued as ‘Circle of Arthur Devis’ (1711–1787). Judging by her dress, it was from the 1740s.

The estimate was low, and the condition was encouraging. There was fifty years’ worth of grime on the surface, but underneath it looked pretty much intact. The gloved hand was a virtuoso bit of painting. But whose?

While I was pondering, Dad had a brainwave. He realised he was looking at an early portrait by Thomas Gainsborough. It was the quality, he said. She couldn’t be by anyone else. She reminded him of Gainsborough’s earliest self-portrait, painted when he was first working in London at the age of thirteen, and rediscovered in the early 1980s by the actress Adrienne Corri. The lady in green was a maturer work, but the stylistic handwriting was identical.

Even under old varnish, our portrait had the same presence. The lady’s elusive, mobile expression began to work its magic on us. We had to make a bid.

You might wonder why we didn’t view her in the flesh. The photo told us everything we needed to know, and viewing a sleeper in public can be a Clouseau-esque nightmare.