The Blue Boy
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 |
| The Blue Boy |
| Thomas Gainsborough, circa 1770 |
| oil on canvas |
| 177.8 × 112.1 cm |
| Huntington Library, San Marino, California |
The Blue Boy (c. 1770) is an oil painting by Thomas Gainsborough that now resides in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. The painting itself is on a fairly large canvas for a portrait that measures 48 inches wide by 70 inches tall. Perhaps Gainsborough's most famous work, it is thought to be a portrait of Jonathan Buttall, the son of a wealthy hardware merchant. Gainsborough had origanally had painted something different on the canvas but then decided to paint over the canvass the portrait of the blue boy. It is a historical costume study as well as a portrait: the youth in the painting wears clothing not of Gainsborough's time, but of the early 1600s.
It is said that Gainsborough painted the portrait mainly to prove to his chief rival Joshua Reynolds that it was possible to use blue as the central color of a portrait.
The painting was originally in the collection of the Duke of Westminster and caused a public outcry in Britain when it was sold in 1921 by the infamous dealer Joseph Duveen, later Lord Duveen of Millbank. It was bought by the American railway pioneer Henry Edwards Huntington for $182,200, then a record price for any painting. In 1922, before its departure to California, The Blue Boy was briefly put on display at the National Gallery where 90,000 people paid homage to the painting.
[edit] Appearances in popular culture
In popular culture, the easy recognizability of the Blue Boy has, like the Mona Lisa, lent it to numerous parodies including versions in which the boy is replaced by Mickey Mouse and Kermit the Frog. A 1990 Life Magazine cover story[1] on the then recently deceased Jim Henson described a Kermit version of the portrait hanging in the second-floor conference room of the 1928 brownstone that served as Henson's New York City headquarters.
In the 1988 comedy film The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! the Blue Boy (or a facsimile) hangs in the office of the wealthy villain played by Ricardo Montalbán, where it is eventually destroyed by Leslie Nielsen's bumbling protagonist character during a botched break-in attempt.
In Ghostbusters II (1989), Dr. Janosz Poha exclaims to Peter Venkman, with heavy accent approximated, "Theees eeesn't Gainsborough's Blue Boy, ees Preeence Veego, Ruler of Carpathia and Moldavia!"
"Blue Boy" is also an album by Canadian songwriter Ron Sexsmith.
The Boy is also a painting in Nintendo's Animal Crossing: Wild World named "
[edit] References
- Conisbee, Philip. The Ones That Got Away, essay from Saved! 100 Years of the National Art Collection Fund (2003, ed. Richard Verdi). London: Scala
- http://www.gardenofpraise.com/art39.htm
