Top Story: The Blue Boy
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 painting itself is on a fairly large canvas for a portrait that measures 48 inches wide by 70 inches tall.
Perhaps Gainsborough’s most famous work, it is thought to be a portrait of Jonathan Buttall, the son of a wealthy hardware merchant.
1770 is an oil painting by Thomas Gainsborough that now resides in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Emma Thompson stars as Marie, a woman trapped in an unhappy marriage to philandering husband Joe.
Pinkie, facing The Blue Boy in the Main Gallery of the museum and often paired with it in popular esteem, is by Thomas Lawrence, one of the great portrait painters of his generation.
It is a historical costume study as well as a portrait: the youth in his 17th-century apparel is regarded as Gainsborough’s homage to Anthony Van Dyck, and in particular is very close to Van Dyck’s portrait of Charles II as a boy.
In a move that caused a public outcry in Britain, it was then sold on to the American railway pioneer Henry Edwards Huntington for $182,200 .
Phyllida Law is the real life mother of Emma Thompson.
It was bought first by the politician John Nesbitt and then, in 1802, by the portrait painter John Hoppner.
Marie is an insecure housewife whose husband, Joe, is having an affair.
The narrative, however, is less important that the sheer beauty of the picture and the display of Turner’s painterly talents.
For all other uses of Blueboy and Blue Boy see Blueboy.
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.
The children of King Charles I of England in 1637 by Van Dyck.
Romney’s Clavering Children portrays Thomas John and Catherine Mary, children of George Clavering of Greencroft, in Durham.
Emma Thompson and Adrian Dunbar compellingly portray the roles of a troubled couple about to have their first child.
View on the Stour together with The Hay Wain was also shown in Paris in 1824, where their truthfulness to nature had an immediate impact on French artists of the period such as Eugene Delacroix, who repainted one of his works upon seeing Constable’s pictures.
It has been said that Gainsborough painted the portrait mainly to prove to his chief rival Joshua Reynolds that it was possible to use blue as the central color of a portrait, but this statement has been discredited: the rumor began circulating after Gainsborough’s death and Reynolds had painted portraits in blue long before.
Although many of them were commissioned by the people depicted, and eventually hung in their houses, most of the pictures were shown initially at the annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy in London.
Before its departure to California in 1922, The Blue Boy was briefly put on display at the National Gallery where it was seen by 90,000 people; the Gallery’s director Charles Holmes was moved to scrawl “Au revoir” on the back of the painting.
When the couple goes on holiday, Marie gets obsessed with the ghost of a little boy who drowned in a nearby lake.
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Painted in rich but somber tones that contribute to the sublimity of the image, Siddons is shown seated in a grand chair that seems to float on a cloud.
The use of water imagery pervades this film from the blue mist at night to its tragic watery conclusion.
When it reopens on May 28, 2008, after a $20 million renovation, the gallery will offer visitors an enhanced experience with one of the finest collections of European art in the nation as well as a more accurate sense of the lifestyle of one of the most prominent millionaires of the early 20th century.
It came to the institution two years after her death in 1924 and has been on display ever since in a memorial gallery established by her husband.
As this engaging short film is set in the Gaelic speaking Highlands of Scotland some attention to the indigenous language of this region would have assisted in credibility and continuity.
In this century, the picture has undergone several conservation treatments, having been transferred from its original wood support to canvas and then laid on panel.
In this depiction of Venice’s Grand Canal flooded with light, Turner displays the chromatic brilliance that made him one of the leading artists of his day and a key figure in the Romantic movement.
