“The Blue Boy”
It’s always interesting to me how certain pieces become these iconic representations of an entire artist’s career. This painting here is one such piece.
This rather large oil on canvas portrait (it is over 70 inches, almost 6 feet tall!) is by the English portrait artist, Thomas Gainsborough, from circa 1770, and is titled “The Blue Boy”. Though the exact identity of the young man is not definitively known, it is thought to be a portrait of Jonathan Buttall who was the son of a wealthy merchant and a teenager at the time the painting was made and was in Buttall’s possession until 1796 when he filed for bankruptcy.
Though it is not readily evident to modern day viewers, the boy in the painting is actually wearing a costume piece, dated to perhaps a century earlier then when it was painted. Known as “Van Dyke dress”, the style is an homage to the seventeenth century Flemish Baroque artist, Anthony van Dyck, whose court paintings were influential to the British artists of the eighteenth century.
“The Blue Boy” became relatively popular in the early twentieth century and copies for the general public sold well.
The painting has faded somewhat, but if you look carefully, you may be able to make out the dog in the lower right part of the painting, by the boy’s feet.
An interesting facet about the history of this piece is that Gainsborough painted it in this color palette almost as a direct response to his art rival, Joshua Reynolds. In a letter that Reynolds had written to Gainsborough, he said that the majority of colors in a painting should be warm colors (such as red and yellow) and that the cold colors (such as blue, green, and gray) should only be used to support the warmer colors. Reynolds thought that was the key to making a well-balanced and harmonious piece. In response, Gainsborough painted this piece in mostly cold colors, and was still able to achieve the harmonious composition that Reynolds had thought couldn’t be done. And it is by far Gainsborough’s most iconic painting.
“The Blue Boy” is currently in the collections of the Huntington Art Museum in San Marino, California in the United States where it is undergoing conservation.
For more on Thomas Gainsborough, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
