This iconic painting by Thomas Gainsborough, which is one of the gems of the Huntington painting collection, portrays in full length a young gentleman in blue attire standing on a wooded slope in a natural landscape.
Credit
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens
The Blue Boy was Gainsborough's first attempt at depicting full-length Van Dyck dress—knee breeches and a slashed doublet with a lace collar. This type of costume recalled the work of Anthony van Dyck, the Flemish painter whose glamorous portraits of aristocrats had revolutionized British art decades earlier. When the painting was shown in 1770 at the Royal Academy, the nod to Van Dyck drew comparison between the two artists and helped create a name for Gainsborough among the exhibition's London audience.
In 2018–19, technical study and conservation treatment of the painting provided many details about Gainsborough's brushwork, pigments, and methods. A digital X-ray revealed its underlayers more clearly than ever before. At the top center, a man's head is visible, a remainder of an abandoned portrait that indicates that the artist reused a canvas. At lower right, a dog that was once part of Blue Boy's composition has been painted over, focusing more attention on the figure. Such details suggest that Gainsborough began Blue Boy on his own initiative and reworked it for maximum effect.
Other analysis shed light on Gainsborough's pigments, and the removal of overpaint and cloudy varnish exposed the sheer mastery of his brushwork. To catch the eye, the shimmering blue satin of the clothing is rendered in a spectrum of colors—containing ultramarine, smalt, Prussian blue, and possibly azurite. These subtle shades were applied in extremely complex layers of vigorous slashes and fine strokes. Technical details such as these have added to our understanding of the painting as Gainsborough's showpiece. Created to draw the public's admiration in 1770, Blue Boy continues to do so today.
