| The Blue Boy | |
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| Artist | Thomas Gainsborough |
| Year | c. 1770 |
| Medium | oil on canvas |
| Movement | Rococo |
| Dimensions | 177.8 cm× 112.1 cm(70.0 in× 44.1 in) |
| Location | Henry E. Huntington Art Gallery [1] , San Marino, California |
The Blue Boy (c. 1770) is a full-length portrait in oil by Thomas Gainsborough, owned by The Huntington in San Marino, California. [2]
One of Gainsborough's best known works, The Blue Boy was long thought to be a portrait of Jonathan Buttall (1752–1805), the son of a wealthy hardware merchant, because of his early ownership of the painting. This identification has never been proven and as Susan Sloman argued in 2013, the likely sitter is Gainsborough's nephew, Gainsborough Dupont (1754–1797). [3] It is a historical costume study as well as a portrait; the youth appears in clothing from the 17th century as the artist's homage to Anthony van Dyck and is very similar to Van Dyck's portraits of young boys, especially his double portrait of brothers George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, and Lord Francis Villiers. [4]
Gainsborough had already drawn something on the canvas before beginning The Blue Boy, which he painted over. The painting is about life-size, measuring 48 inches (1,200 mm) wide by 70 inches (1,800 mm) tall.
In 1821, John Young (1755–1825), a printmaker and keeper of the British Institution, published a reproduction of the painting for the first time and told the story of how the artist painted The Blue Boy to contradict the advice of Sir Joshua Reynolds. As president of the Royal Academy of Arts, Reynolds had lectured publicly on the use of warm and cool colours in his Eighth Discourse presented in 1778.
It ought, in my opinion, to be indispensably observed, that the masses of light in a picture be always of a warm, mellow colour, yellow, red, or a yellowish white, and that the blue, the grey, or the green colours be kept almost entirely out of these masses, and be used only to support or set off these warm colours; and for this purpose, a small proportion of cold colour will be sufficient. Let this conduct be reversed; let the light be cold, and the surrounding colour warm, as we often see in the works of the Roman and Florentine painters, and it will be out of the power of art, even in the hands of Rubens and Titian, to make a picture splendid and harmonious. [5]
This origination story appealed to the public's perception of the distinctly different personalities of Reynolds and Gainsborough since it set the two artists in opposition. As president of the Royal Academy, Reynolds was a disciplined advocate of history painting who played an active role in curriculum development and delivery, and the presentation of the annual exhibitions. Gainsborough, on the other hand, was a portrait painter and landscapist and remained aloof from any academic functions. Reynolds was knighted in 1769 and wrote art criticism and delivered lectures while Gainsborough never received sovereign recognition and wrote lively correspondence as his written legacy. These and other real and imagined differences between the two artists were exaggerated in subsequent reports about the creation of The Blue Boy.
Although it eventually became clear that the painting was completed by Gainsborough eight years before Reynolds' Eighth Discourse, the story about how it resulted from a challenge over warm and cool colours was too good to give up. The repeated erroneous account propelled the painting to international fame. [6]
The painting was in Buttall's possession until he filed for bankruptcy in 1796. It was first bought by the politician John Nesbitt and then, in 1802, by the portrait painter John Hoppner. In about 1809, The Blue Boy entered the collection of the Earl Grosvenor and remained with his descendants until its sale by the second Duke of Westminster to the California railroad magnate Henry Edward Huntington in 1921. [7] Before its departure to California in 1922, The Blue Boy was briefly put on display at the National Gallery in London, where it was seen by 90,000 people. The British recognized the loss of Gainsborough's painting in several notable ways including its appearance on stage towards the end of the Mayfair and Montmartre variety show at the New Oxford Theatre in spring 1922. Framed on stage, dressed as the boy in the painting, and flanked by cowboys and Indians, the celebrity Nellie Taylor sang Cole Porter's "The Blue Boy Blues". [8]
The Grosvenor family played a significant role in the increasing fame of The Blue Boy during the 19th and early 20th centuries. They not only allowed visitors into their London residence to see the painting, they also frequently lent the painting to important exhibitions, including the Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester in 1857 when The Blue Boy captured the attention of viewers who had likely never previously given much thought to fine art. Gallery guides and exhibition publications passed on the story of the disputed origins of the painting and claimed that "there is nothing which has attracted more universal admiration than this 'far-famed' painting." The painting was subsequently exhibited to much public acclaim at the Great London Exposition in 1862, the Royal Academy and the South Kensington Museum in 1870, the Grosvenor Gallery in 1885, and the Royal Academy in 1896, when it was identified as "the most famous of all of his pictures" by a review in the London Times . [9]
In addition to viewing Gainsborough's Blue Boy in public venues, the painting also appeared in publications and as individual black-and-white and colour prints. It became a popular ceramic figure and showed up in advertisements. The boy in blue also came alive with men, women, boys, and girls dressing up in similar costumes and pretending to be Gainsborough's youth at fancy-dress balls and marriage ceremonies, in pantomimes and plays, and eventually in movies and television programmes. [10]
When girls and women masqueraded as Gainsborough's Blue Boy on stage and screen, they brought about a gradual feminization of the youth. By the early 20th century, Marlene Dietrich was photographed in a Blue Boy costume and Shirley Temple appeared as Gainsborough's youth in the movie Curly Top in 1935. Shortly after the painting showed up in the main entrance of the Cleaver family residence during the third season of the Leave it to Beaver show in 1959, viewers increasingly associated feminine traits with the boy in blue, leading to his connection to an emergent gay culture.
In September 1970, The Blue Boy was "outed" in the pages of Mad Magazine in a strip called "Prissy Percy". In the four-panel strip, artist Jack Rickard and writer Frank Jacobs used contemporary stereotypes of homosexuality to contrast Gainsborough's boy in blue with a group of football players. Stereotypes linking The Blue Boy and homosexuality were well established when Hank Ketcham, the creator of "Dennis the Menace," cast Gainsborough's boy in blue as a "sissy" in a multi-panel strip that included a line by Dennis confusing the painter Gainsborough and the Beat poet and gay peacenik Allen Ginsberg. [11]
In 1974, former TV Guide advertising manager Don N. Embinder (a.k.a. Don Westbrook) published the first issue of Blueboy Magazine , an upscale, gay bi-monthly magazine with nude photography, slick advertisements, and articles by writers such as Christopher Isherwood and Randy Shilts. Rescuing Gainsborough's Blue Boy from sissiness, Embrinder introduced him as the embodiment of the recently liberated gay man. The premier issue featured a bright blue cover with a photograph of a young man dressed up as Gainsborough's boy in blue from the waist up. Embinder re-appropriated Gainsborough's Blue Boy from the funny pages and transformed a derogatory stereotype into an emblem of pride. [12]
Among the gay artists who have embraced The Blue Boy as a symbol of gay emancipation are Robert Lambert (a member of Les Petites Bon-Bons), Howard Kottler, and Léopold Foulem. [13]
The Blue Boy was temporarily loaned to the National Gallery, London, and placed on view on 25 January 2022, a century to the day since it left the UK in 1922. It remained in the National Gallery for five months before returning to the US permanently. [14] [15]
In October 2021, Kehinde Wiley's Portrait of a Young Gentleman was installed opposite to Gainsborough's Blue Boy in the Huntington Museum of Art.
In Quentin Tarantino's film Django Unchained , the main character Django, a freed slave, chooses to wear an outfit similar to that worn by Gainsborough's subject in The Blue Boy. [16]
It inspired the 1980s Garbage Pail Kid "Blue Boy George" (fifth series).
In 1985, the picture was referenced in the song "Art is for Your Heart" on the Muppet Babies episode "The Muppet Museum of Art", with Gonzo wondering about the painting and Kermit stating the subject's possible preference for green clothing. [17]
The painting is also seen in the movie Batman (1989) as hanging in Gotham museum, and again in the Joker (2019) movie hanging in smaller form in the Joker's apartment.
In the introduction of the television series Pee-wee's Playhouse (1986-1990), the painting can be seen hanging in the background while Pee-wee is singing the theme song.
In the Disney Series Wizards of Waverly Place (2007-2012) the Blue Boy is also shown in Episode 21 of Season 1.
The painting is seen hanging in Vincent Ludwig's office in the film The Naked Gun .
In the movie Ghostbusters 2 (1989), the character Janosz Poha contrasts a large portrait of the fictional 16th-century sorcerer Vigo the Carpathian with Gainsborough's Blue Boy.
A split-second image in Teacher's Pet shows a parody of the painting featuring Leonard.
Over the credits of Cinderella III: A Twist in Time , a parody of the painting featuring Gus dressed in this outfit is shown.
It appears as an in-game item in the Animal Crossing series.
The Blue Boy inspired pop artist Robert Rauschenberg to pursue a painting career. [18] It is often paired with a painting by Thomas Lawrence called Pinkie that sits opposite to it at the Huntington Library.
On "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride" in Disneyland California, before exiting your car, you can spot a painting of Toad posing while dressed all in blue holding a feathered hat. This is a Toad-themed reproduction of Gainsborough's oil painting The Blue Boy. [19]
The Blue Boy painting is a heavily-used prop in the 1929 Laurel and Hardy comedy Wrong Again .
The painting is also referenced in the movie Coraline as a portrait in the Pink Palace's hearth room.
The painting is seen leaning against the wall in the storage room of the Salem police station in the Season 7 episode of Bewitched 'Samanthas Hot Bedwarmer' which is the second part of the 8 part story arc 'The Salem Saga' ( S7 E4). Production of Bewitched moved to Salem in June 1970 due to a fire at the Hollywood studio.
In the BBC sitcom Keeping Up Appearances episode The Country House Sale (series 5, episode 6), Hyacinth is looking to buy a painting that is similar to The Blue Boy.
Sir Joshua Reynolds was an English painter who specialised in portraits. John Russell said he was one of the major European painters of the 18th century. He promoted the "Grand Style" in painting, which depended on idealisation of the imperfect. He was a founder and first president of the Royal Academy of Arts and was knighted by George III in 1769.
Thomas Gainsborough was an English portrait and landscape painter, draughtsman, and printmaker. Along with his rival Sir Joshua Reynolds, he is considered one of the most important British artists of the second half of the 18th century. He painted quickly, and the works of his maturity are characterised by a light palette and easy strokes. Despite being a prolific portrait painter, Gainsborough gained greater satisfaction from his landscapes. He is credited as the originator of the 18th-century British landscape school. Gainsborough was a founding member of the Royal Academy.
Watercolor or watercolour, also aquarelle, is a painting method in which the paints are made of pigments suspended in a water-based solution. Watercolor refers to both the medium and the resulting artwork. Aquarelles painted with water-soluble colored ink instead of modern water colors are called aquarellum atramento by experts. However, this term has now tended to pass out of use.
Frederic George Stephens was a British art critic, and one of the two 'non-artistic' members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Sir Anthony van Dyck was a Flemish Baroque artist who became the leading court painter in England after success in the Spanish Netherlands and Italy.
Dulwich Picture Gallery is an art gallery in Dulwich, South London. It opened to the public in 1817 and was designed by the Regency architect Sir John Soane. His design was recognized for its innovative and influential method of illumination for viewing the art. It is the oldest public art gallery in England and was made an independent charitable trust in 1994. Until then, the gallery was part of the College of God's Gift, a charitable foundation established by the actor, entrepreneur and philanthropist Edward Alleyn in the early 17th century. The acquisition of artworks by its founders and bequests from its many patrons resulted in Dulwich Picture Gallery housing one of the country's finest collections of Old Masters, especially rich in French, Italian and Spanish Baroque paintings, and in British portraits from the Tudor era to the 19th century.
Blueboy was a gay men's magazine with lifestyle and entertainment news, in addition to nude or semi-nude men. It was published monthly from 1974 to 2007. The Detroit Free Press described the publication as "a full-color, slick gay version of Playboy magazine."
The Yale Center for British Art at Yale University in central New Haven, Connecticut, houses the largest and most comprehensive collection of British art outside the United Kingdom. The collection of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, rare books, and manuscripts reflects the development of British art and culture from the Elizabethan period onward.
Cornelius Johnson or Cornelis Janssens van Ceulen was an English painter of portraits of Dutch or Flemish parentage. He was active in England, from at least 1618 to 1643, when he moved to Middelburg in the Netherlands to escape the English Civil War. Between 1646 and 1652 he lived in Amsterdam, before settling in Utrecht, where he died.
Mr and Mrs Andrews is an oil on canvas portrait of about 1750 by Thomas Gainsborough, now in the National Gallery, London. Today it is one of his most famous works, but it remained in the family of the sitters until 1960 and was very little known before it appeared in an exhibition in Ipswich in 1927, after which it was regularly requested for other exhibitions in Britain and abroad, and praised by critics for its charm and freshness. By the post-war years its iconic status was established, and it was one of four paintings chosen to represent British art in an exhibition in Paris celebrating the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. Soon the painting began to receive hostile scrutiny as a paradigm of the paternalist and capitalist society of 18th-century England, but it remains a firm popular favourite.
John Roddam Spencer Stanhope was an English artist associated with Edward Burne-Jones and George Frederic Watts and often regarded as a second-wave pre-Raphaelite. His work is also studied within the context of Aestheticism and British Symbolism. As a painter, Stanhope worked in oil, watercolor, fresco, tempera, and mixed media. His subject matter was mythological, allegorical, biblical, and contemporary. Stanhope was born in Cawthorne, near Barnsley, Yorkshire, England, and died in Florence, Italy. He was the uncle and teacher of the painter Evelyn De Morgan and encouraged then unknown local artist Abel Hold to exhibit at the Royal Academy, which he did 16 times.
John Trevor Hayes was a British art historian and museum director. He was an authority on the paintings of Thomas Gainsborough.
Pinkie is the traditional title for a portrait made in 1794 by Thomas Lawrence in the permanent collection of the Huntington Library at San Marino, California where it normally hangs opposite The Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough. The title now given it by the museum is Sarah Goodin Barrett Moulton: "Pinkie". These two works are the centerpieces of the institution's art collection, which has notable holdings of eighteenth-century British portraiture. The painting is an elegant depiction of Sarah Moulton (1783–1795), who was about eleven years old when painted. Her direct gaze and the loose, energetic brushwork give the portrait a lively immediacy.
Breeching was the occasion when a small boy was first dressed in breeches or trousers. From the mid-16th century until the late 19th or early 20th century, young boys in the Western world were unbreeched and wore gowns or dresses until an age that varied between two and eight. Various forms of relatively subtle differences usually enabled others to tell little boys from little girls, in codes that modern art historians are able to understand but may be difficult for the layperson to discern.
Grand manner refers to an idealized aesthetic style derived from classicism and the art of the High Renaissance. In the eighteenth century, British artists and connoisseurs used the term to describe paintings that incorporated visual metaphors in order to suggest noble qualities. It was Sir Joshua Reynolds who gave currency to the term through his Discourses on Art, a series of lectures presented at the Royal Academy from 1769 to 1790, in which he contended that painters should perceive their subjects through generalization and idealization, rather than by the careful copy of nature. Reynolds never actually uses the phrase, referring instead to the "great style" or "grand style", in reference to history painting:
Gainsborough Dupont was a British artist, the nephew and pupil of Thomas Gainsborough, R.A.
Gainsborough's House is the birthplace of the leading English painter Thomas Gainsborough. It is now a museum and gallery, located at 46 Gainsborough Street in Sudbury, Suffolk, England. It is a Grade I listed building. Some of the pictures on display have been acquired with the help of the Art Fund.
Portrait of Anne, Countess of Chesterfield is a large oil-on-canvas painting by the English portrait and landscape artist Thomas Gainsborough, completed between 1777 and 1778. It shows Anne Stanhope, wife of Philip Stanhope, 5th Earl of Chesterfield, sitting in a blue and while satin dress, sitting in a garden, and is one of the best known of Gainsborough's many portraits of English aristocrats.
The Academicians of the Royal Academy is an oil painting executed in 1771–72 by Johan Zoffany. The group portrait was produced shortly after the foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1769. It portrays 34 of the early members of the Royal Academy preparing for a life drawing class with a nude male life model. The two female founding academicians – Angelica Kauffmann and Mary Moser – are not shown as present, as it would have been inappropriate for them to attend a life drawing class in person: rather, Zoffany includes them by showing their portraits hanging on the walls.
A drapery painter refers to a specialist painter commissioned to complete the dress, costumes and other accessories worn by the subjects of portrait paintings. They were employed by portrait painters with a large workshop in 18th century England. While the portraitist completed the face and hands, the drapery painter was responsible for the pose and costume. The specialists were not necessarily assistants in the workshop of the portrait painters but rather subcontractors.
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Media related to The Blue Boy at Wikimedia Commons
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