Thomas Gainsborough was an English painter, born in Sudbury, Suffolk, in 1727, who died in London in 1788. He is remembered for The Blue Boy, a young man in a suit of shining blue satin that sold in 1921 for a record price, and for a quick, feathery touch that made him the great rival of Joshua Reynolds. The picture most people come looking for did not leave England quietly.
In 1922 The Blue Boy left London for California, and so many people came to say goodbye that the New York Times counted 90,000 of them at the National Gallery in its last days there.
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The dealer Joseph Duveen had bought the picture from the Duke of Westminster, and he sold it to the American railway tycoon Henry Huntington for 728,000 dollars, the highest price recorded at that time. Duveen made the departure a public event with a farewell showing at the National Gallery, and a pencilled note on the stretcher read "Au revoir. CH.", the initials of the gallery's director, Sir Charles Holmes.
The picture also comes with a legend. Joshua Reynolds, the president of the Royal Academy, taught in his lectures that blue and the other cold colors should be kept almost entirely out of the lit parts of a painting, and the story goes that Gainsborough painted a whole figure in blue to prove him wrong.
The dates do not fit. Reynolds gave that lecture in 1778. The Blue Boy had already hung at the Royal Academy in 1770, eight years earlier, under a plain title, A Portrait of a Young Gentleman, and it was only by 1798 that people were calling it The Blue Boy.
Even the boy himself is in doubt. Nobody has proved who he was, and when the canvas was X-rayed in 1994, it showed that Gainsborough had not started with him alone.
What You'll Discover
What he left blank on a lap.
Who the boy in blue was.
What the X-ray found beside him.
Why he pulled every picture.
The box lit by one candle.
The name he said at the end.