![]() Blurring the boundaries between portraiture and genre painting, it was already being called ‘The Blue Boy’ by 1798. Gainsborough exhibited the painting at the Royal Academy in 1770 as Portrait of a Young Gentleman. It will be fascinating to see how this painting, which has come to epitomise particular constructions of the 18th century and of Englishness, resonates in 21st-century Britain. The loan of The Blue Boy to the National Gallery, exactly 100 years after its sensational departure for America, is a chance for the British public to reacquaint itself with one of the artist’s most complex and provocative masterpieces. Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, San Marino. The Blue Boy (1770), Thomas Gainsborough. The record-breaking price that the American railway magnate Henry Huntington paid for the painting and the emotive drama of its leave-taking from Britain in 1922 sealed its singular status. A Victorian fashion columnist mocked the taste for coloured kid gloves in hot weather, having seen an Edinburgh woman turn herself into The Blue Boy when the dye ran a warehousemen’s trade magazine explained how ‘Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy” would have been bluer than ever if he passed a day in the St. Through discussion and reproduction, it became one of the handful of paintings (like the Mona Lisa and Whistler’s Mother) so familiar that it could be joked about in shorthand by people who might never see it. ![]() ![]() In 1857, its display at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition, at the height of the public cult of Gainsborough, made it a particular object of reverence. A painter’s showpiece rather than a commissioned work, it received immediate critical acclaim, was emulated by artists and valued by collectors, and the circumstances of its creation were puzzled over by connoisseurs. Gainsborough’s Blue Boy has long been singled out as a work apart. ![]()
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