Art Review: Huntington Library, Museum, Botanical Gardens Classy and Comfortable

The Blue Boy, painted by Thomas Gainsborough in 1770, is shown in the grand painting salon at the Huntington in San Marino in California or, precisely, the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. I think it’s as famous as Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1, or Whistler’s Mother, Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, Michelangelo’s David, and Warhol’s Gold Marilyn.

Gainsborough argued at the time that a portrait’s dominant color should be blue for coolness as opposed to using warm colors, so The Blue Boy might have been his manifesto. Few Georgian portraits, even by Gainsborough, are this blue, though, so from its debut to now, 250 years later, it startles viewers. Jacket and sleeve are made of slashes, long and short, of indigo, lapis, cobalt, slate, turquoise, and cream.

The Blue Boy, painted by Thomas Gainsborough in 1770, is shown in the grand painting salon at the Huntington in San Marino in California or, precisely, the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. I think it’s as famous as Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1, or Whistler’s Mother, Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, Michelangelo’s David, and Warhol’s Gold Marilyn.

Gainsborough argued at the time that a portrait’s dominant color should be blue for coolness as opposed to using warm colors, so The Blue Boy might have been his manifesto. Few Georgian portraits, even by Gainsborough, are this blue, though, so from its debut to now, 250 years later, it startles viewers. Jacket and sleeve are made of slashes, long and short, of indigo, lapis, cobalt, slate, turquoise, and cream.