New Light: Blyth Spirits
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts.
In 2005 the Maine auction house F. O. Bailey Antiquarians offered a late eighteenth-century oil portrait of Nancy Bezoil Lane and her daughter Betsy as a painting “in the manner of Joseph Badger.” Marvin Sadik by then an art dealer, but formerly the director of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC bought it with a winning bid of $32,480. He had recognized the portrait as the work of the Salem, Massachusetts, artist Benjamin Blyth, an attribution based on the painting’s subject, its composition, its characteristic handling of anatomical elements, and its palette. Sadik’s coup ranks as one of the most notable discoveries of a Blyth oil portrait.