Thomas Gainsborough - The Blue Boy (video)

12 min 02 :

The most famous Gainsborough above all is associated with the artist great rival Reynolds. For two centuries it has been widely believed that Reynolds argued against the youth of blue as the main color in a painting and Gainsborough decided to defy him by painting this time a converse : The Blue Boy. It is a well told tale but the known fact failed to confirm it :

That idea that colors recede and become more bluish as one goes further into the distance aerial perspective, started to become a rule in painting. So the ideas were that warmer colors, browns and golds and things, should become positive foreground colors ; and the cooler colors, blues and greens, should become used and reserved for the background.

And Reynolds rather began to teach this as almost the fixed rule.
This was a challenge to Gainsborough and he painted this boy completely in blue and in a Van Dyck costume. He was actually the son of, I think, a farrier. So he wasn't very well elevated this boy at all, but nevertheless, this picture disproved Reynolds at sad and has become quite famous has a sense.

As far as we know Gainsborough's Blue Boy as it is now called (Gainsborough himself did not call it The Blue Boy), it was just the portrait of a gentleman. He exhibited this in 1770. Now the remarque in the Reynolds discord was not before 1778. So there is no way he could have been painted that picture to respond that theorie. The story that he painted it to respond the theorie isn't found to late 1820, about 30 years after the Gainsborough's death. So it does seem that this is an invented story that was really embroidered after the knowledge of the rivalry.

The Blue Boy is a portrait of Jonathan Buttall, a young man who certainly had connections in ipwitch. Jonathan became a good friend of Gainsborough, and it appears that the artist painted this famous image for his own purposes, not as a commission. 
Gainsborough made a perfect contemporary dress for his portrait subjects, but here, he decided to experimente with a kind of clothing seeing in great works of Van Dyck. This dramatic clothing is the most memorable fixture for cambers. The strength of the young man posture and the way he seems to be in charge of the breeding get harmonious landscape. He is impressive. It remains a giant image of English art.

The two masterpieces of The Huntington's Gallery

Thomas Gainsborough, The Blue Boy, c.1770.

Thomas Gainsborough was born in 1727 in Sudbury (East of England). He spent several years in London working with the French artist Hubert Gravelot when he was a teenager. In 1759, he moved to Bath (West of England). His reputation, especially as a portraitist, grew quickly. He began to exhibit his work in London in the early 1760s. His main rival was Joshua Reynolds. Gainsborough died of cancer in 1788 in London.

We don't know exactly when Gainsborough painted The Blue Boy. Stylistically, it's clear that the painting must date after the middle of the 1760s but before the 1780s. To date this portrait, we know that Gainsborough exhibited a portrait of a man in Van Dyck dress at the Royal Academy in 1770.

This painting is a tribute to he admired above all others : Antoon Van Dyck, who was making portraits of the aristocracy in the 17th century. Gainsborough painted this piece apparently for his own pleasure. This "blue boy" is Jonathan Buttall as mentionned in the book of Edward Edwards (an associate of Gainsborough at the Royal Academy), Anecdotes of Painters: "This was the portrait of a Master Buttall, whose father was then a very considerable ironmonger, in Greek-street, Soho". Buttall was a personnal friend of the artist. The vitality of this masterpiece is given by the blue of the costume.

Jonathan Buttall had financial difficulties in the 1790s and his possession were sold in December 1796. The sale was followed by the artist Joseph Farington, who noted in his diary: "Gainsboroughs picture of a Boy in a Blue Vandyke dress sold for 35 guineas".
 Later, the portrait remained in the Westminster collection until it was bought in 1921 by Henry E. Huntington. After several exhibitions in London, the painting left England and arrived in New York on February ,7, 1922. It was exhibited at the Duveen Galleries from February 14 to March 7. The Blue Boy arrived finally in San Marino on March 21, 1922.

European Art Gallery

The Huntington Art Gallery is situated in the villa built in San Marino by Henry Huntington in 1911 and opened to the public in 1928, only a year after Henry’s death, as he wanted. The north façade is reflecting Arabella’s affinity for Paris architecture, while the south façade is in the Mediterranean style of early 20^th century California. Inside, there is a big scale, wanted by Arabella too. The entry of the house is modest, with a space for welcoming the visitors and for putting their coats and their luggage. The house contains a hall, a library, a drawings room, a dining room, a terrace… Actually, there is no more bathrooms and kitchen (it’s not useful now that is an art gallery). 

The Huntington's house in San Marino.

The interior has been designing by Arabella and Duveen Brothers (a art dealer). The residence was described by Edwin E. Flynn, special London correspondent of the San Francisco Examiner in 1909 : “The Duveens are planning the entire interior decoration of the new Huntington mansion, which is destined to be an art palace… The library in which the [Beauvais] tapestries are to be hung will be of the Louis XIV period, the drawing room a Louis Seize example while the dining-room and corridor will purely Georgian. The Duveens are now collecting pieces of painting and sculpture and objects of art to harmonize with the various rooms”. Actually, all the walls and the rooms of the house are decorated with European paintings, sculptures, objects of decorative art, prints and drawings, from the 15^th to the early 20^th century. Some of those artworks were found when Henry and Arabella were honeymooning in Europe in 1913.

A part of this art collection consists of British paintings of the 18^th and early 19^th century by the most important English artists of the period : Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Lawrence, Joshua Reynolds, George Romney, William Turner, John Constable, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones... Anyway, the two masterpieces of the Art Gallery are Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough and Pinkie by Thomas Lawrence (but we will see more about those paintings later). Henry began to concentrate on British portraits in 1908 ; Arabella bought her first significant 18^th century British portraits for San Marino collection when she was in Paris in July 1911 (ex : Thomas Gainsborough, Penelope, Viscountess Ligonier and Juliana, Baroness Petre). One of the last English artworks bought by Huntington, in 1922, is The Grand Canal : Scene – A Street in Venice by William Turner (or Marriage of the Adriatic). After Arabella’s death, Henry continued to purchase British art.

Thomas Gainsborough, Penelope, Viscountess Ligonier,

1770.

William Turner, The Grand Canal: Scene -

A Street in Venice, c. 1837.

In the French collection, the Barbizon paintings were bought by Arabella, for example Hauling in the Net (Twilight) by Camille Corot bought in 1907. But the French art of the collection is mostly from the 18^th century, represented by artists such as Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Jean-Baptiste Greuze. The collection includes a group of Sèvres porcelain and a set of Beauvais tapestries.

Camille Corot, Fisherman Hauling in the Net,

Twilight, c.1870.

Sevres Porcelain Manufactory, Lidded Vase, 1781.

Old Master paintings of the Huntington came from the Rodolphe Kann collection (Kann was a mining magnate and banker who assembled an art collection in the 1880s). It’s the case of Aristotle with a Bust of Homer by Rembrandt, today exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of New York, Portrait of a Little Girl by Diego Velazquez, and the Virgin and Child by Roger Van der Weyden. Some decorative artworks, like vases or ewers, came from the Kann collection. But the most important part of the Kann collection bought by Arabella and Henry Huntington is still certainly the set of five Beauvais tapestries (18^th century), including The Noble Pastoral designed by François Boucher, and already mentioned in the French collection.

Roger Van der Weyden, Virgin and Child,

c.1460.

Regarding Italian Renaissance art, we can name Domenico Ghirlandaio with Portrait of a Man and Portrait of a Woman, or a later Venitian artist : Antonio Canaletto.

Domenico del Ghirlandaio, Portrait of a Man and

Portrait of a Woman, c.1490.

Henry Huntington

Henry E. Huntington (1850-1927)

Henry Huntington was born in 1850 in State of New York. He was the nephew of Collis Huntington, one of the Central Pacific Railroad’s creators. He married Mary Alice Prentice in 1873. Henry became “First Assistant” to the president of the Southern Pacific in April 6, 1892. His career with the Central and Southern Pacific Railway systems culminated in 1893, when he was elected president of the Pacific Improvement Co. as well as president of the Central Pacific Railway. 

Henry made his first trip to California in April 1892, travelling by rail with Collis. Later, Henry remained in San Francisco. His wife, Mary Alice, and their children, resided for about a year at the Hotel Richelieu in San Francisco. In spring of 1893, Henry bought a residence in this city. 

In 1899, with another first vice president in San Francisco, Henry declared there would be no reason for him to stay in this town. Henry decided to move south to take up his interests in the Los Angeles area and bought the San Marino Ranch in 1903. He transformed this place into what we know now as The Huntington Library. However, Mary Alice remained in San Francisco and continued to reside at the Jackson Street house until her death in 1916 (the couple divorced before that, in 1906). 

At 60, Henry was getting more and more interested in books and art, that’s why he left his company to devote his time for this hobby. Henry Huntington’s inheritance from Collis contributed significantly to his increasing purchases of rare books and manuscripts. Henry had started collecting while he was living in San Francisco during the 1890s. By the early years of the twentieth century he turned to the international market for rare books and manuscripts to form his extraordinary library. In 1904, Henry Huntington bought the Charles A. Morrogh library of about a thousand titles, in several thousand volumes, from the dealer Isaac Mendoza of New York.

 In 1913, Henry remarried Arabella Duval, who was the second wife of Collis Huntington. Arabella was sharing his interest on books and art. Before being married to Henry, Arabella had a small collection of books and manuscripts, described by Archer, her son : “On this trip [to Paris] Mother has made some very interesting purchases and not a few books of French art and letters”.

Arabella Huntington (1850-1924)

Together, Henry and Arabella bought a collection of French and British art. Arabella was more concentrated on collecting art while Henry was focused on gathering books (his principal book dealer was George D. Smith) and on the construction of the Library building in San Marino started in 1919. 

Arabella died of a pneumonia in 1924, and Henry Huntington died in 1927. They are buried in their own Mausoleum, planned by the architect John Russell Pope and built between 1925 and 1929 in San Marino. Before their death, their collections of books and art were very important, and Henry and Arabella had decided to give their property and their collections to the public of their estate in 1919, and now, at The Huntington Library, you can see one of the Bible printed by Gutenberg in the 15^th century.

The Gutenberg Bible