Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, Back in London

A good show and a good catalogue at the National Gallery, but a bad space for a dazzling painting

T his past summer I wrote about the Huntington in San Marino. Between its gardens, the art of horticulture at its best, its rare books and manuscripts, and its American and European collections, it bundles pleasure and scholarship in an irresistible, unique package.

There are many, many heavy-hitter works of art at the Huntington, but The Blue Boy, by Thomas Gainsborough, is its star attraction. Henry Huntington, the founder, bought the painting in 1921 from the dealer Joseph Duveen, who got it from the Duke of Westminster. At £9 million in today’s money, or a bit over $12 million, it was touted as record-breaking. To some, it was certainly heartbreaking.

The Blue Boy was famous from the time Gainsborough showed it at the Royal Academy in 1770. The subject’s come-hither look, debonair and raffish, and his sumptuous Prussian-blue costume enthralled and, among old fogies, appalled.

When it left the country for America in 1922, many in the U.K. felt that a much-loved child was going off to make his mark in a bigger arena. The Brits had just lost a million young men in World War I. Losing The Blue Boy reminded but also stung. Big American money got its way. No one in England had £9 million to spare. Past, present, and future merged, as in Dickens.

The National Gallery in London displayed the painting in January 1922 for a couple of weeks before it left for California. Nearly 100,000 visitors saw it during this wistful goodbye. Cole Porter wrote “The Blue Boy Blues” in 1922, in which the morose “Blue Boy,” very much not wanting to leave, wails,

A silver dollar took me and my collar
To show the slow cowboys
Just how we boys
In England used to be dressed.

Now, a hundred years later, The Blue Boy is back. The painting has never before left the Huntington. It’s on view in Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, a show at the National Gallery. It’s a small-focus exhibition comparing the painting with other Gainsboroughs, two paintings by Antony Van Dyck that inspired Gainsborough, and The Red Boy, by Thomas Lawrence. The Huntington swapped the picture for a loan of the National Gallery’s An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump, from 1768, by Joseph Wright of Derby. The painting is on view now at the Huntington in an exhibition on art and science.

It is well worth seeing and has a sharp, succinct, and scholarly catalogue. I would have made more of the event. The Blue Boy is a crowd-pleaser and, having just been cleaned, a dazzler. Gainsborough isn’t topical, though. Academically, The Blue Boy is not canonical. It isn’t in anyone’s Western art-history survey class, though I’d include it in mine. It’s a fantastic thing, fantastic as a masquerade piece and also beautifully painted. As works of art go, too, it’s a celebrity. Celebrity’s always worth studying. Alas, the show’s stuck in an isolated gallery. More on that in a bit.

The Blue Boy exhibition looks at how Gainsborough took Van Dyck’s portraiture, which visually defined Charles I’s court, and retooled it for the age of George III. The National Gallery’s own Lord John Stuart and His Brother, Lord Bernard Stuart, from 1638, by Van Dyck, is offered as one prototype. Younger brother Bernard stands a step lower than his brother John, acknowledging the elder’s seniority, but Bernard’s stance is all about sass and attitude. He positively shimmers, his blue coat turned over his shoulders to expose fabulous silver-satin lining and a silver embroidered doublet. The glove hanging from his grasp points to embroidered blue breeches, kid-leather boots, and heels that announce, “I go wherever I want, thank you.” Gainsborough copied the painting in 1765. It’s the zenith of Cavalier portraiture. Both brothers were killed in Charles I’s army.

Van Dyck’s George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, and Lord Francis Villiers, from 1635, is another model. For The Blue Boy, Gainsborough borrowed George’s pose, reversing his sway and hand-on-hip. George’s elbow, covered by his cloak, has less of a jut. Like the image of Lord Bernard Stuart, Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy” is in our face, a pushy sharp elbow if there ever was one.

More seditiously, Gainsborough banished red for blue. Reynolds, the Royal Academy’s first president, believed that masses of yellow or red should dominate a painting, with blue and green used only as accents. Warm colors evoke gravity, authority, harmony, and stature, which is why they were the staple of Titian and other Venetian Old Masters, he thought. Blue, a cool color, was for play, for the young and hip. Reynolds, the top establishment painter, also felt that an emerging revival of Van Dyck costumes indulged “whimsical, capricious forms” that simply weren’t high-minded.

So, The Blue Boy, shown at the Royal Academy’s second exhibition, the Oscars of London art, was both a poke at Reynolds and a statement that an opposite pole exists. Reynolds, Zoffany, Batoni, Romney, and Hogarth were among the high-end British portraitists who borrowed Van Dyck’s haughty, informal look, though they reduced the voltage. Gainsborough responded by amping it up. He applied transparent layers of different blues in gestural slashes, little strokes, and dabs that refracts light, so the figure seems to glow from within. English painters tended to shorter brushstrokes, modest impasto, and a look of crisply defined finish. The sleeves of the “Blue Boy” are done slasher-style, as in Tintoretto’s work, which Gainsborough knew, or El Greco’s, which he didn’t. It’s a bit of a renegade approach.

The age of Van Dyck and Charles I was far less egalitarian than that of Gainsborough and George III. For all the dash, swagger, and mien-oozing entitlement in The Blue Boy, the subject isn’t an aristocrat. Hanging in the Royal Academy for all the elites of London’s art world to see was a face no one knew. Everyman, or Everyboy, could grab the iconography of an aristocrat. “The Blue Boy’s” face isn’t generic, but whose face is it? Whoever the subject, he’s an overnight star, and, willfully dressed in hip blue, he looks like a lord. Gainsborough’s daring is another thing that makes this a great picture. Whistler was said by Ruskin to have flung a pot of paint in the face of the public. Gainsborough aimed his pot at Reynolds and made it Prussian-blue.

The catalogue looks briefly at whom the subject might be. The accepted line points to Jonathan Buttall, always called by scholars “the son of an ironmonger” to emphasize his downscale status. The Buttalls weren’t stoking furnaces, however. The family was bourgeois, and though the younger Buttall went bankrupt, he once owned The Blue Boy. Now it’s thought that Gainsborough Dupont, Gainsborough’s nephew, was the model. In a 1773 bust portrait, definitely of Dupont and definitely by Gainsborough, he’s wearing the costume of “The Blue Boy.” The problem is that Dupont doesn’t look like the teenager in The Blue Boy. Academics often need to say something new. I’m sticking with Buttall.

The catalogue has three essays. One is on Van Dyck and Gainsborough while the others treat The Blue Boy’s status in 19th-century Britain and in America for the past 100 years. All three are short and good. That Leave It to Beaver shows an illustration of the painting in the Cleaver home both underscores The Blue Boy’s fame and invests the Beaver boy’s gift for mischief with an Old Master lineage.

The Gainsborough show is in a small gallery next to what used to be the museum’s front door, since closed for a new — and dumb — entrance and exit. More on that later. Now, though it’s still called Gallery 1 on the floor plan, it’s a nowhere, dead-end space.

It should have gone in the Sunley Room, a grand gallery off the Central Hall and the galleries for Spanish and Italian paintings. There’s a Kehinde Wiley show there called “Prelude.” He’s yet another American looming large in the arts in London, joining Helen Frankenthaler, Helen Levitt, expat Blue Boy, and Leopold and Loeb.

Wiley painted the Barack Obama presidential portrait, which I reviewed favorably in 2018. He specializes in portraits in Old Master–style (think Napoleon Crossing the Alps, by David), with African Americans in place of the dead white dudes. They’re not bad but, after seeing a few of them, it’s obviously a schtick, obvious except to the bourgeois liberals who fawn over them.

Wiley’s work, the National Gallery tells us, “raises questions about power, privilege, and identity and, above all, highlight the absence or relegation of Black subjects in European art.” Whenever I read the line “raises questions about power, privilege, and identity” in an art show, and it’s as common in museums as “toilets this way,” I wonder, “Like what questions?” The questions usually aren’t complicated or nuanced, though they’re made out to be.

“Why do Grand Manner portraits always depict hoity-toity honkies?” This, as far as I can divine, is the one key question. You don’t have to be Galileo to answer that one. “Because they had all the money.” Duh. Sure, “Why so?” is a good, follow-up question, but the portrait, as a work of art, can’t answer that. It’s not interested in questions like that, since it lives in the realm of aesthetics.

“Why so?” is a deeply rich question, but it immediately reduces the work of art to an illustration of economic, social, and political points.

The Old Masters working for popes, kings, and generals didn’t paint black people. That’s for sure. Neither did they paint my mother’s ancestors — peasants in the Marche in Italy — or my father’s, who were English, Scottish, and Irish and, later, colonial, farmers, ministers, and shopkeepers.

Wiley’s exhibition is about why Old Master landscapes and seascapes didn’t include black people. It’s one of those brain-teasers where the answer is “who cares.” Gainsborough’s a far better artist. Wiley’s portraits are attractive and decorative. They’re flat as wallpaper. It titillates to see, say, Michael Jackson’s face slapped on a cartoon copy of Ruben’s Restoration of Philip II on Horseback.

Beyond that, though, Wiley’s picture is a one-trick pony. There’s not much else happening. I can’t see how his landscape and seascape riffs on Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, Winslow Homer’s Herring Net, or Friedrich’s Chalk Cliffs on Rügen are any different. There are, I’m sure, lots of good, young black British artists who can play with Old Master art with more meaningful provocation. Why not get one of them?

Trafalgar Square has been pedestrianized for a while now, but I hadn’t realized the National Gallery had closed its old — and original — entrance. The gods of people-processing are to be appeased at the cost of architectural integrity. Now visitors enter through the Sainsbury Wing and slog up the stairs to the Italian Renaissance rooms or down, down, down as deep as the deepest tube station to the temporary exhibition galleries. People in cities are accustomed to underground spaces, but when it comes to looking at art, they’re a decided depressant. They can exit from the Sainsbury Wing but, in the old building, need to exit onto Trafalgar Square via the Annenberg Wing, opened in 2004.

It is what it is, but losing the old entrance stinks. Visitors once entered untrammeled by ticketers and X-ray machines. At their feet were glorious Art Deco floor mosaics reminding us, had we forgotten, how wondrous life can be if only we embrace a small number of such virtues as compassion, the strength to defy tyrants, gratitude, lucidity, the love of pursuit, good humor, and delectation, not the hedonist’s but the epicure’s. Illustrated medallions extol each. They’re from the late 1920s into the early ’50s and called “The Labours of Life,” The Pleasures of Life,” and “Modern Virtues.”

There’s a scene in which Churchill vanquishes a beast looking suspiciously German. Impolitic, I know, but it’s defiance in action. There’s a mosaic passage each for curiosity, an open mind, and an appreciation of a sixth sense helping us decipher mysteries or parse dilemmas. In our crazy world, I suspect that there are people at the National Gallery who cried, “this is the stuff of white privilege!” That no figure is visibly oppressed might have been triggering. Out of favor were decreed both the old front door and the inspirational mosaics. They’d rip the floor out if they could, but it’s landmarked.