The Boy in Blue and the Pink Boy. Source: Wikipedia

The Boy in Blue is rumoured to be Thomas Gainsborough’s most famous work. It was painted in about 1770 in a style reminiscent of Van Dyke. The pose is very similar to that in the  The children of King Charles I of England in 1637 by Van Dyck.

The children of King Charles I of England in 1637 by Van Dyck. Source: Wikipedia

There is an opinion that Gainsborough painted the portrait in response to comments by the great portrait painter Joshua Reynolds.

Reynolds wrote:

It ought, in my opinion, to be indispensably observed, that the masses of light in a picture be always of a warm, mellow colour, yellow, red, or the green colours be kept almost entirely out of these masses, and be used only to support or set off these warm colours; and for this purpose, a small proportion of cold colour will be sufficient. Let this conduct be reversed: let the light be cold, and the surrounding colour warm, as we often see in the works of the Roman and Florentine painters, and it will be out of the power of art, even in the hands of Rubens and Titian, to make a picture splendid and harmonious.

In 1921 the Duke of Westminster sold the painting to Henry Edwards Huntingdon, an American railway magnate. Huntingdon paid a record £162,000 for the painting.  Some 90,000 people saw the painting at a farewell exhibition at the National Gallery.  There was an outcry that the painting was leaving the United Kingdom.  The painting was shipped to California in 1922.

Much less is known about Gainsborough’s companion piece, the Pink Boy. Once again, this would have been painted in the 1770’s and depicts a boy in  fancy dress typical of the costumes which would have been worn in Van Dyck’s portaits from the 1630s and 1640s.  The painting was first displayed at the Royal Academy in 1782 and is now on display at Waddesdon Manor.

The juxtaposition of the red and blue colours between the Blue and the Pink Boy make me wonder whether Gainsborough was experimenting with the use of colour in the light of Reynold’s comments.