The Blue Boy

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The Blue Boy (Thomas Gainsborough)
The Blue Boy
Thomas Gainsborough , 1769/1770
Oil on canvas
179, 39 × 123, 83 cm
The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Garden, San Marino Inventory number 21.1
Anthony van Dyck: George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham , and Lord Francis Villiers, 1635, Windsor, Royal Collection

The Blue Boy (1769/1770, German Boy in Blue ) is an oil painting by Thomas Gainsborough that is in the possession of the Huntington Collections in San Marino , California . The picture is today - next to the "Morning Walk" and the "Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher" (both 1785) - one of Gainsborough's most famous works worldwide.

The portrait shows Jonathan Buttall (1752–1805), the son of a wealthy ironmonger, at the age of 18. The painting shows him in clothing from the early 17th century, not the 18th century when the picture was taken. The painter thus ties in with the portrait of a boy dressed in red by his baroque colleague Anthony van Dyck , whom he saw as a model. The color blue, it is said, came into the picture because Gainsborough wanted to prove to his rival Joshua Reynolds that this color could also be used centrally in a picture, which Reynolds is said to have denied, but this statement by Reynolds can only be proven in 1779 .

history

Thomas Gainsborough painted the portrait of his friend Jonathan Buttal in 1769 or early 1770. It was first shown in the exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in the summer of 1770 and was then in the possession of the sitter. In 1796 the MP John Nesbitt bought it, in 1802 the painter John Hoppner bought it . Around 1809 the picture entered the collection of Robert Grosvenor and remained in the family collection until Hugh Grosvenor sold it in 1921 to the art dealer Joseph Duveen , who in turn immediately sold it to the American railroad pioneer Henry E. Huntington . There were protests against exports. The price of £ 182,200 was the highest price ever paid for a picture at the time. Before the painting was shipped to the United States in 1922, it was briefly exhibited in the National Gallery in London, where 90,000 people saw it.

Afterlife

The image's high recognition factor has made it - like the Mona Lisa - an often-cited motif in popular culture. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau based his first work Der Knabe in Blau (1919) completely on this picture. Cole Porter sang the Blue Boy Blues after the painting arrived in America in 1922 . The picture appears in the Laurel and Hardy short film The Horse on the Piano ( Wrong Again ) (1929), but here the painting is mistaken for a horse of the same name. In Die Nackte Kanone (1988), Leslie Nielsen destroys a Blue Boy , and James Bond's opponent, Gustav Graves, destroys a Blue Boy during a fencing scene in the film Die Another Day (2002) . Another version of the Blue Boy can be recognized in a portrait of a mouse dressed in the same way. There are also versions in which Mickey Mouse or Kermit the Frog (this version hung in Jim Henson's office building) are depicted as a blue boy .

literature

  • Werner Busch : Gainsborough's Blue Boy - creating meaning through color . In: Städel-Jahrbuch NF 17, 1999, pp. 331–348 ( digitized version ).
  • Robyn Asleson, Shelley Bennett: British paintings at The Huntington . Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino / Yale University Press, New Haven, London 2001, ISBN 0-300-09056-0 , pp. 104–111 No. 17.
  • Susan Sloman: Gainsborough's 'Blue boy' . In: The Burlington magazine 155, No. 1321, 2013, pp. 231-237.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Robyn Asleson, Shelley Bennett: British paintings at The Huntington . Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino / Yale University Press, New Haven, London 2001, ISBN 0-300-09056-0 , p. 107. 110 Note 25.
  2. ↑ Robyn Asleson, Shelley Bennett: British paintings at The Huntington . Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino / Yale University Press, New Haven, London 2001, ISBN 0-300-09056-0 , p. 106.
  3. ↑ Robyn Asleson, Shelley Bennett: British paintings at The Huntington . Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino / Yale University Press, New Haven, London 2001, ISBN 0-300-09056-0 , pp. 8. 13-14; Meryle Secrest : Duveen. A Life in Art . Knopf, New York 2004, ISBN 0-375-41042-2 , pp. 191-199.
  4. ↑ In the credits of the Disney film Cinderella III (2007).
  5. ↑ Stephen Harrigan: It's Not Easy Being Blue . In: Life Magazine , July 1990 .

Web links

Commons : The Blue Boy  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
  • The Blue Boy in the Huntington Collections online catalog
  • Werner Busch, Gainsboroughs Blue Boy - Creation of Meaning through Color in the Städel Yearbook, NF 17 (1999), pp. 331–348 ( online, PDF )