Blue Boy — perhaps The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens’ most iconic artwork — returned home to his adopted home of San Marino on Saturday, June 11, after an extended vacation at the National Gallery in London.
Art lovers made their way to the museum’s Thornton Portrait Galley on Saturday to welcome the lad back to Southern California.
Painted by Thomas Gainsborough in 1770, “The Blue Boy” first appeared in public in the Royal Academy exhibition held the same year as “A Portrait of a Young Gentleman,” where it received high acclaim, according to museum officials.
According to the National Portrait Gallery, the subject is not indeed royalty or a member of a family of wealth and stature. It’s Jonathan Buttall, an ironmonger who was friendly with Gainsborough.
At first, artist Thomas Gainsborough’s masterwork didn’t garner the attention it later received, at least not among the public.
The painting debuted in 1770 at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, just two years after the institution was founded.
It was a whopping success among his fellow artists, who appreciated his dynamic and nuanced brushwork, and his “virtuosic use of paint,” McCurdy said, particularly how he used multiple pigments of blue to make the satin fabric really pop.
Fifty years later, it started to take on a different meaning when it began to be reproduced
By 1798, officials said it was regularly referred to as “The Blue Boy”—a nickname that stuck.
Henry E. Huntington purchased The Blue Boy in 1921 for $728,000, the highest price ever paid for a painting at the time, according to the the Library.
During its inaugural journey from London to Los Angeles, “The Blue Boy” caused a sensation in the United States, according to library officials, since it was the focus of a series of exhibitions engineered by art dealer Joseph Duveen.
The art dealer and Huntington himself organized a going away party of sorts for the painting, where tens of thousands came out to say goodbye to a quintessential piece of British history before it was sent to California.
As it traveled the world, the dealer fed media outlets regular updates: The Blue Boy is on a train, the Blue Boy is crossing the ocean, the Blue Boy is traversing across America, the Blue Boy has arrived in California.
The painting has remained a part of the core art collection built by Huntington and his wife Arabella and a visitor favorite since it went on view when The Huntington opened to the public in 1928.
After the turn of the Century — that is, 2000 — museum officials began to worry about the state of the painting. Its varnishes and overpaints were aging and becoming discolored and experts worried about the canvas itself weakening.
In 2013, museum leaders hired Christina O’Connell to be their first painting conservator to study the artwork before restoration.
Using several different techniques, including X-ray and infrared scans, O’Connell could look behind some layers of paint. She saw a dog sitting next to the boy, noting that Gainsborough eventually painted over the pooch, which was first discovered in 1994 by another team of conservators. She also saw what appeared to be another portrait hiding under the layers.
By 2017, the painting had been painstakingly stabilized, work began in earnest to restore The Blue Boy, O’Connell started to slowly clean off layers of varnish and dirt using small swabs; in some areas, there were as many as six layers to remove, centimeter by centimeter.
Instead of taking the painting down for several years, the museum transformed the restoration into an exhibit unto itself. In full view of the public, O’Connell consolidated and stabilized the flaking paint under a surgical microscope, which streamed an image to a large television, allowing visitors to see what O’Connell was seeing.
During that time, museum officials said the museum had more day-to-day visitors coming to see the Blue Boy than before the process began.
In September 2019, O’Connell moved the piece from the museum floor into the conservation lab to start the final part of the process.
The 18-month restoration was completed in February 2020. The COVID pandemic drove the Blue Boy into seclusion, however, as the outbreak forced the closure of the museum to the public until the crisis eased.
This past January, Blue Boy trekked back to Trafalgar Square. In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the painting’s purchase, the painting was loaned out for a four-month exhibition run at the National Gallery, marking the first time The Huntington loaned the painting since it left its original home a century ago.