Clarence Blue & Queen Adelaide

This post includes sections originally from an upcoming post on plans to recreate the Ginsburg &/or DAR Museum dresses, both of which are described as being made of "Clarence blue" fabric.

I fell in love with the two dresses illustrated above due in a large part to their beautiful colour, which is described in their official entries as "probably" Clarence blue. Not knowing anything about this colour, I set off to figure out a) what it was, and b) whether I could buy fabric this colour from modern vendors.

According to both the Cora Ginsburg catalogue and the write-up at the DAR Museum, Clarence Blue was a fashionable colour from c1818. It was called Clarence blue because it was apparently the favourite colour of the new Duchess of Clarence, Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen (1792-1849). Adelaide had married the aging Prince William, Duke of Clarence in 1818, and both collections suggest that this marriage was the trigger for her favoured colour becoming fashionable. While this sequence of events is entirely logical, I wanted to verify this information before I spouted it off to anyone else. 

Evidence for Adelaide's personal preference in colours is somewhat scanty, or just poorly recorded because no one else has been interested in discussing a former Queen's favourite colour. While I found a number of portraits of Adelaide in shades of blue, neither the National Portrait Gallery nor the Royal Collection Trust (who own many) made mention of any significance of the colour blue to the lady herself. 

This lovely essay by Alden O'Brien of the DAR Museum talks about the fashions in 1818 introduced by or named after the Royal marriages of the Dukes of Clarence and Kent. His essay is a wonderful resource for me, not only for the work he's done on discussing the shade(s) of blue attributed to Adelaide, but also by sharing some fantastic close-ups of both my Inspiration dresses, which I've not seen elsewhere. He also shared the final destination of the Ginsburg dress, which he states is now held by the Met Museum.

Excellent!

O'Brien notes a great reference to "Clarence blue satin" from September 1818, and also states that William DeGregorio (who wrote the Ginsburg catalogue section) has found earlier references back to the February of 1817. I found another reference to "An Adelaide blue silk dress" in the June 1831 issue of The Magazine of the Beau Monde, although the journal unfortunately does not come with any illustrations, nor any further indication of the precise shade of blue. As so often happens, the assumption that the reader already knew what the author was talking about leads to a sad and unintended loss of knowledge. These entries definitely indicate a contemporary association between the broad colour "blue" and the person of Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen.

Shade?

But what shade of blue was Clarence Blue?

My first assumption would be to look at the two dresses and to assume that they exemplify the colour, but DeGregorio and O'Brien both make it clear that this is an assumption made through correlation, not a definitive proof of the shade. What do I mean by that? Here are the following things we know for sure:

• There was a shade of blue popular in c1818 which was referred to as Clarence Blue
• These dresses date from approximately 1818 based on other evidence (e.g. skirt style, provenance etc.)
• These dresses are in a shade of blue

What we don't know for certain from these dresses specifically is that these dresses are proven to be in the shade that was called Clarence Blue.

Sarah Walden wrote a blog post in 2011, where she tried to show swatches of all the colours popular during the Regency era. This is a really interesting post, and I find it really useful for seeing the broad categories of where a named shade fit, but I'm not sure whether all are accurate. Her list does include Clarence blue, but the colour is very different to that of the dresses. Sarah describes Clarence blue as being "another ... sky blue", and her swatch is very similar to the colour shown on the ColourLovers website as "Clarence blue" (hex: 79A3DD; RGB 121, 163, 221).

I feel that Walden's swatch for "Prussian blue" is a better match with the colour of dresses, or another ColourLovers swatch named "Clarence" (hex: 3A5470; RGB: 58, 84, 112). There appear to be a multitude of colours described as Clarence or Clarence blue, which vary incredibly. Add in the variations of fading over the 200+ years between 1818 and now, and I can understand why we are viewing such a wide variety of possible answers.

DeGregorio refers to her 1831 NPG portrait (see below) as an example of her wearing "the distinctive hue", and also describes it as a "deep sapphire colour". 

O'Brien refers to another 'new' colour that became fashionable after the accession to the throne of Adelaide's husband, now King William. This colour was called "bleu Adélaide" and was a light blue rather than the richer sapphire identified by DeGregorio. This suggests to me that sometime in the intervening centuries the two shades have become merged into the same name of "Clarence blue". 

Possible Examples

There are numerous portraits of Adelaide surviving, where she is wearing shades of blue, although I am not able to tell whether these are likely to all be attempting to depict the same original shade. Below are a few that I can share which are a) reproduced online in colour, and b) reliably identified as being of Adelaide as either the Duchess of Clarence (1818-1830) or Queen Adelaide (1830-1849).

RCIN 420216. Royal Collection Trust. c.1818?

Portrait of Queen Adelaide, when Duchess of Clarence, c.1818
(c) RCT

This dress in this image is a light and bright blue, without any obvious green or red undertones, except to the rear of her right shoulder (left as you look at her). 

NPG 1533. National Portrait Gallery, London. c.1831

Queen Adelaide (Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen) by Sir William Beechey, circa 1831.
CC BYNCND

The image here is quite dark, but does show a beautiful blue velvet with a slight hint of green to it. It is definitely not a "sky blue" shade.

RCIN 420239. Royal Collection Trust. 1844

Miniature of Queen Adelaide, 1844
(c) RCT

This is a miniature image of the Queen Adelaide, which is dated 1844 on the reverse. The dowager Queen is again wearing a vivid shade of deep blue.

RCIN 405389. Royal Collection Trust. 1849

Queen Adelaide, 1849, by Winterhalter
(c) RCT

This portrait of the Queen was one she sat for shortly before her death in the same year. The RCT describes her as "wearing a black lace cap", but the trim on her lace cap appears quite blue in the website image. This blue looks to me to be a more green based one, compared to all the earlier portraits.

The exact shades of items in portraits cannot always be assumed to be completely accurate. Princess Charlotte wore a blue sarafan-style dress (known as "Princess Charlotte's Russian Dress") shortly before her death in November 1817. The Royal Collection Trust holds both the original dress and a portrait of her wearing it, and a second variant of the portrait is in the National Portrait Gallery. None of which have precisely the same shade of blue. 

Conclusion

The dresses as they are now, show a green base to the blue, which isn't really reflected in the portraits. The fashion plates shown by O'Brien also show a deeper blue akin to the shade in the portraits. My current opinion, based on the information I have to date, is that the deep rich blue of the portraits is the shade originally referred to as Clarence blue; and that the lighter sky-blue shade was the shade described in 1830 as "Bleu Adélaide".