Thomas Gainsborough and the Other “Blue Boy”

Self-Portrait

May 14 is the baptismal day of the painter Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), best known as the creator of The Blue Boy (1770), which ranks with the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, The Creation of Adam and such like as one of the best known and most oft reproduced paintings of all time, for some reason. (Not that it shouldn’t be, but that degree of appreciation is outside my wheelhouse. And on some basic level Gainsborough doesn’t speak to my gut in the same way the work of his rival and critic Joshua Reynolds does.

Gainsborough was just as attracted to landscapes as he was portraits, and yeah, all of those paintings of people with parasols and purebred pets lolling around on a summer’s day just kinda puts me to sleep. That said, Gainsborough did do some high-profile portraits and on that basis we include him here, for he painted the likes of David Garrick, Mrs. Siddons, Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Johann Christian Bach, Venetian ballerina Giovanna Baccelli, and one “Mr. Wood the Dancing Master”. Gainsborough was one of the founding members of the Royal Academy and an associate of Hogarth’s. Reynolds, the Academy’s first President, didn’t care for either one of them, or at least, their approaches to painting. It has often been claimed that The Blue Boy was painted as a response to a quote by Reynolds, though the quote in question dates to several years after the painting.

Misunderstanding about The Blue Boy also lays at the heart of one of Laurel and Hardy’s most hilarious comedies Wrong Again (1929). In the film, the boys are instructed to move the painting into their client’s mansion. Unfortunately, there is also a racehorse by that name, and THAT’S what they move into the house. I have rarely heard such laughter in a cinema as when, after all kinds of crazy maneuvering, the boss tells them to just leave “Blue Boy” on the piano.

And of course, there was a British film studio named after the painter. A topic for another day.