Greetings luv2buy3-ga!
I had a great time researching The Blue Boy as I found some wonderful
paintings by the same artist! I would like to share with you the
history of the painting you recently purchased.
The original name of the painting is "Jonathan Buttall: The Blue Boy"
(c 1770). The artist was Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88). It is painted
with oil paints on a canvas and is quite large; 48 inches wide and 70
inches tall. He painted it over another painting that he had already
started to paint.
The best-known painting at the Huntington, Gainsborough's The Blue
Boy, portrays Jonathan Buttall, the son of a successful hardware
merchant, who was a close friend of the artist. The work was executed
during Gainsborough's extended stay in Bath before he finally settled
in London in 1774. The artist has dressed the young man in a costume
dating from about 140 years before the portrait was painted. This type
of costume was familiar through the portraits of the great Flemish
painter, Anthony Van Dyck (1559-1641), who was resident in England
during the early 17th century. Gainsborough greatly admired the work
of Van Dyck and seems to have conceived The Blue Boy as an act of
homage to that master. Mr. Huntington purchased the painting along
with Gainsborough's The Cottage Door and Reynolds's Sarah Siddons as
the Tragic Muse from the Duke of Westminster.
Source:
Hunnington Gallery
(http://www.huntington.org/ArtDiv/HuntingGall.html )
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Gainsborough, Thomas (1727-88) was an English painter of portraits,
landscapes, and fancy pictures, one of the most individual geniuses in
British art.
He was born at Sudbury, Suffolk, and went to London in about 1740,
probably studying with the French engraver Gravelot. He returned to
Sudbury in 1748 and in 1752, he set up as a portrait painter at
Ipswitch. His work at this time consisted mainly of heads and
half-length, but he also painted some small portrait groups in
landscape settings, which are the most lyrical of all English
conversation pieces (Heneage Lloyd and his Sister, Fitzwilliam,
Cambridge). His patrons were the merchants of the town and the
neighboring squires, but when in 1759 he moved to Bath, his new
sitters were members of Society, and he developed a free and elegant
mode of painting seen at its most characteristic in full-length
portraits (Mary, Countess Howe, Kenwood House, London, c.1763-64).
In 1768, he was elected a foundation member of the Royal Academy, and
in 1774, he moved permanently to London. Here he further developed the
personal style he had evolved at Bath, working with light and rapid
brush-strokes and delicate and evanescent colors. He became a favorite
painter of the Royal Family, even though his rival Reynolds was
appointed King's Principal Painter.
Gainsborough sometimes said that while portraiture was his profession
landscape painting was his pleasure, and he continued to paint
landscapes long after he had left a country neighborhood. He produced
many landscape drawings, some in pencil, some in charcoal and chalk,
and he occasionally made drawings that he varnished. He also, in later
years, painted fancy pictures of pastoral subjects (Peasant Girl
Gathering Sticks, Manchester City Art Gallery, 1782). Gainsborough's
style had diverse sources. His early works show the influence of
French engraving and of Dutch landscape painting; at Bath his change
of portrait style owed much to a close study of Van Dyck (his
admiration is most clear in The Blue Boy, Huntingdon Art Gallery, San
Marino, 1770); and in his later landscapes (The Watering Place,
National Gallery, London, 1777) he is sometimes influenced by Rubens.
But he was an independent and original genius, able to assimilate to
his own ends what he learnt from others, and he relied always mainly
on his own resources. With the exception of his nephew Gainsborough
Dupont, he had no assistants and unlike most of his contemporaries, he
never employed a drapery painter.
He was in many ways the antithesis of Reynolds. Whereas Reynolds was
sober-minded and the complete professional, Gainsborough (even though
his output was prodigious) was much more easy-going and often overdue
with his commissions, writing that `painting and punctuality mix like
oil and vinegar'. Although he was an entertaining letter-writer,
Gainsborough, unlike Reynolds, had no interest in literary or
historical themes, his great passion outside painting being music (his
friend William Jackson the composer wrote that he `avoided the company
of literary men, who were his aversion... he detested reading').
Gainsborough and Reynolds had great mutual respect, however;
Gainsborough asked for Reynolds to visit him on his deathbed, and
Reynolds paid posthumous tribute to his rival in his Fourteenth
Discourse. Recognizing the fluid brilliance of his brushwork, Reynolds
praised `his manner of forming all the parts of a picture together',
and wrote of `all those odd scratches and marks' that `by a kind of
magic, at a certain distance... seem to drop into their proper
places'.
Source:
Web Museum, Paris
(http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/gainsborough/)
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Current prices per Sotheby?s auction in London, Olympia on 29 Jun 04 10:30 AM for:
'BLUE BOY': A FRAMED BERLIN PORCELAIN PLAQUE
DECORATED IN DRESDEN, LATE 19TH CENTURY
is estimated at $800 - $1200 GBP. This is equivalent to $1,200.00 to
$1,800.00 if I figured it correctly. (Figuring if $50 GBP is equal to
$75 US dollars. If this is incorrect, please feel free to correct me).
Source:
Sotheby?s
(http://search.sothebys.com/jsps/live/lot/LotDetail.jsp?lot_id=48QZH )
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I was really intrigued by the research and was very happy to give you
some more information about the painting. If you have any additional
questions that I was not able to provide answers, I would suggest you
call Sotheby?s in London via their email form found at (
http://search.sothebys.com/about/contact/ )
If this answer requires further explanation, please request
clarification before rating it, and I'll be happy to look into this
further.
Nenna-GA
Google Answers Researcher |
