El joven azul

A boy in shimmering blue satin stands life-size in seventeenth-century dress. Nobody is quite sure who he is, and the most famous story about him is not true.

The story behind the painting

Gainsborough painted The Blue Boy around 1770, over a canvas on which he had already drawn something else. For a long time the boy was thought to be Jonathan Buttall, son of a wealthy hardware merchant, because Buttall owned the picture early. That was never proven. In 2013 Susan Sloman argued that the likely sitter was Gainsborough's nephew, Gainsborough Dupont. The portrait is also a costume study: the youth wears seventeenth-century clothing in homage to Anthony van Dyck, and the picture is close to van Dyck's portraits of boys, especially his double portrait of George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, and Lord Francis Villiers.

What to look for

The painting is about life-size, some 180 by 124 cm. Its dominant blue, a cool colour, later gave rise to a famous tale. In 1821 the printmaker John Young published the first reproduction and claimed Gainsborough painted it to contradict Sir Joshua Reynolds, who in his Eighth Discourse of 1778 said the masses of light in a picture should always be warm, with blue, grey or green kept almost entirely out of them.

Meaning and intent

The story pleased the public because it set two very different men against each other: Reynolds, knighted president of the Royal Academy and champion of history painting, and Gainsborough, portraitist and landscapist who kept away from academic duties and never received royal honours. In fact the painting was finished about eight years before Reynolds' discourse. But the tale of a challenge over warm and cool colours was too good to give up, and its repetition helped carry the picture to international fame.

Legacy

Buttall owned it until his bankruptcy in 1796; it passed to John Nesbitt, to the painter John Hoppner in 1802, and around 1809 to Earl Grosvenor, whose family lent it to many exhibitions, from Manchester in 1857 to the Royal Academy in 1896. In 1921 the second Duke of Westminster sold it to the railway magnate Henry Edward Huntington. Before it left for California in 1922, 90,000 people saw it at the National Gallery in London, and a London revue staged its farewell with a song by Cole Porter. It became prints, ceramic figures and costumes, and today hangs at The Huntington in San Marino, California.