Which English artist painted The Blue Boy and The Hay Wagon?
The Blue Boy It is often paired with a painting by Thomas Lawrence called "Pinkie" which sits opposite to it at the Huntington Library. The Blue Boy The Blue Boy (1779) is a full-length portrait in oil by Thomas Gainsborough, now in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Perhaps Gainsborough's most famous work, it is thought to be a portrait of Jonathan Buttall (1752–1805), the son of a wealthy hardware merchant, although this has never been proven. It is a historical costume study as well as a portrait: the youth in his seventeenth-century apparel is regarded as Gainsborough's homage to Anthony van Dyck,
The Blue Boy on the canvas before beginning "The Blue Boy", which he painted over. The painting is about life-size, measuring wide by tall. Gainsborough painted the portrait in response to the advice of his rival Sir Joshua Reynolds, who had written: 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 a yellowish white, and that the blue, the grey, 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