The Art Story on the Blue Boy

[froodle]

Artwork description & Analysis: This full-length portrait depicts a boy, wearing blue satin knee breeches and a lace-collared doublet as he gazes, unsmiling, at the viewer. Holding a plumed hat in his right hand, his other hand cocked on his hip, he conveys both self-confidence and a touch of swagger. Composed in layers of slashed and fine brushstrokes with delicate tints of slate, turquoise, cobalt, indigo, and lapis lazuli, the blue becomes resplendent, almost electric against the stormy and rocky landscape.

Originally, the painting was thought to portray Jonathan Buttall, the son of a wealthy merchant, but contemporary scholarship has identified the model to most likely be the artist's assistant and nephew Gainsborough Dupont. As art critic Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell wrote, the work "is a kind of English Civil War cosplay popular for masquerade balls in the 18th century," depicting the boy in the outfit of a cavalier, worn by aristocratic Royalists of the 1630s. His posture and facial expression play the part as well, for cavaliers were defined not only by their stylish clothing but their nonchalant and swashbuckling attitude. Thus, the work, Gainsborough's most popular, is a tour de force, combining masterful portraiture with a costume study and his artistic reply to the works of Anthony van Dyck, famous for his portraiture of King Charles I's court and the cavaliers who supported him. Yet, by primarily using blue, traditionally thought to be more suited for background elements, Gainsborough also challenged traditional aesthetic assumptions.

The work carries Rococo's traditional visual appeal and play with costumed figures, but Gainsborough also added innovative elements of realism, as seen in the buttons tightly lacing the doublet together, and prefigured Romanticism by portraying a solitary figure outlined against a turbulent sky. Gainsborough came to exemplify British Rococo with society portraits of his wealthy clients.

The painting was immediately successful at its 1770 debut at the Royal Academy of Art in London and became so identified with British cultural identity that, when in 1921 the Duke of Westminster sold it to the American tycoon Henry Huntington, it caused a scandal. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's silent film Knabe in Blau (The Boy in Blue) (1919) was inspired by the painting, as was Cole Porter's song Blue Boy Blues (1922). Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg and contemporary artist Kehinde Wiley were inspired by the work, and artist Alex Israel referenced it in his Self Portrait (Dodgers) (2014-2015). Shown at the Huntington Museum, paired with Thomas Lawrence's portrait of a girl in pink, Pinkie (1794), the work has taken on further cultural relevance, as both paintings have been used in the TV pilot for Eerie, Indiana (1991) and as set decorations on episodes of Leave It to Beaver (1957-1963).

Oil on canvas - Huntington Library, San Marino, California