It was the highest price ever paid for a painting up to that time: for £182,200, the National Gallery London sold Thomas Gainsborough's (c. 1727-1788) painting The Blue Boy to a California railroad pioneer. The popular painting was exhibited again for three weeks before being shipped out amid protests in 1922. It has been revisited time and again in U.S. pop culture, from a photo shoot with Marlene Dietrich to Tarantino's film Django Unchained. Now The Blue Boy returns to London for an exhibition. It will be on view at the National Gallery from January 25 to May 15, 2022. The show, Gainsborough's Blue Boy, places the painting in context with works that inspired Gainsborough to create it.
The full-length portrait became popular in England primarily through the paintings of Anthonis van Dyck beginning in the late 17th century. Thomas Gainsborough saw van Dyck as his great role model and is known for his elegant portraits. He himself was one of the most important British painters of the 18th century and was a co-founder of the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1768. The Blue Boy is unusual because of its central use of the cold color blue in a portrait: Gainsborough wanted to prove that blue could also be used harmoniously in the foreground of a painting. He was right, as evidenced by the enduring popularity of the 250-year-old work to this day. The exhibition in London is eagerly awaited, because the return of The Blue Boy is the first loan of the painting since 1922 – and probably the last, as experts suspect.
