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"We have been to say good-bye to a boy who is leaving in a day or two, forever. He received us dressed in a beautiful blue satin suit" - The Times
"Cheerio, blue boy" - Blue Boy, Orange Juice
Georgian art, specifically portraits of lords and ladies and dukes and duchesses, is not a particular area of interest to me. Neither is it, unsurprisingly in the circumstances, a field in which I am an expert in. But I like, now and then, to take myself out of my comfort zone and attempt to learn something. So when I saw that the National Gallery were exhibiting Thomas Gainsborough's Blue Boy, alongside various other works that either inspired it or are in some way related to it, I thought I'd pop along.
It was free after all. Which was just as well. It was just one small room and though I can't say any of the art moved me, it was at least an interesting educational experience. To a degree. Gainsborough's Blue Boy was, at its time, one of the most famous works of art in the world and even as late as 1921, when it was sold to the California art dealer Henry E. Huntington for £182,000, it was setting a record for the highest price ever paid for a painting.
The record, now, is over £360,000,000 for Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi (a Russian oligarch sold it to a Saudi businessman in case you were wondering where all the world's money has gone). The Blue Boy was painted while Gainsborough (1727-1788) was living in Bath, a city he called home for fifteen years, and had become interested in the work of the Flemish Baroque artist Anthony van Dyck. (1599-1641).
Van Dyck had, knowingly, adapted his style when he arrived in England to fit with the court of King Charles I and what that meant, to me, was that his work was fawning, obsequious, and served a royal agenda. To look at Gainsborough's paintings now, no matter how well made they are, they don't seem all that different.
Thomas Gainsborough - Elizabeth and Mary Linley (1772-1785)
At least the Linley sisters were professional singers rather than princesses, at least they did something, but it's instructive to learn that Gainsborough returned to the painting in 1785, thirteen years after he first made it, to alter the girls' dresses and hairstyles to fit with the latest fashion trends.
Mrs Siddons was the leading tragic actress of her era, she was performing as Lady Macbeth at the Drury Lane Theatre when Gainsborough painted this portrait, and she's been placed in front of a deep red curtain to give the portrait more a sense of her theatricality. It was a subtle move, and one the curators say Gainsborough borrowed from Van Dyck, and quite different to other portraits of Siddons. Joshua Reynolds and others chose to paint her in character. Gainsborough celebrated the fact she was an actress and a person in her own right, rather than the roles she played.
Thomas Gainsborough - Mrs Siddons (1785)
Which was nice of him. The Blue Boy is an actual person - but nobdoy ever seems to be quite sure who the cocksure little snob is. For many years it was presumed to be one Jonathan Buttall, the son of a London ironmonger who at one point owned the painting but, more recently, it's been suggested that it's Gainsborough's nephew and sole apprentice, Gainsborough Dupont (1754-1797), another man who made his life's work the painting of regal figures and assorted heads of state.
I hope the stormy clouds that make up the background to the Blue Boy signify something, impending doom or internal angst perhaps, because otherwise it's just a painting of some Little Lord Fauntleroy staring out at the world with a sense of unburdened entitlement. Even more so than van Dyck's painting, nearly a century and a half earlier, of the Villiers boys, one a duke, the other a lord.
They, at least, have the uncertain expressions of children. That gives them more humanity. Van Dyck's painting was commissioned by Charles I after the Villiers boys' father, the Duke of Buckingham, was murdered in 1628. Further tragedy befell Francis when he died fighting in the English Civil War although George was luckier and went on to become a member of Charles II's court after the Restoration of the monarchy.
Anthony van Dyck - George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham and Lord Francis Villiers (1635)
Anthony van Dyck - Lord John Stuart and his Brother, Lord Bernard Stuart (about 1638)
The Villiers were luckier than the Stuart brothers who both lost their lives, in their early twenties, fighting for the Royalists in the war. It's probably a huge leap to suggest that Van Dyck's gilded paintings helped to create an impression that the nobility, the aristocracy, and the British establishment were woefully out of touch with the people but it does seem to indicate that they were.
Cromwell, of course, was able to exploit that. If only briefly. We can only assume, with Gainsborough returning to Van Dyck's style, that, once again, the upper classes that have almost always ruled Britain once again considered themselves both untouchable and unimpeachable. If not, surely Gainsborough would not have painted such arse licking portraits of them for fear of bringing on the same level of opprobrium.
The National Gallery want us to look at these paintings and marvel at the undoubted technical ability of both Gainsborough and Van Dyck but I came away slightly disgusted. Not just because Britain was so clearly under the cosh of these dukes, lords, and kings for so long - while other people struggled for basics like food and shelter - but because the country still is.
Though I enjoyed learning a little history lesson, one that even took in such seminal figures in the art world as Titian, Claude, Rubens, and Van Ruisdael, I came away thinking there's a more important social, and political, history to be learned from looking at these paintings. We should not celebrate false idols - and all idols are false.
After I left the small Gainsborough room I went to look at some Impressiont paintings of nature to cleanse my palate. The grovelling, oleaginous, art of Thomas Gainsborough and Anthony Van Dyck seems perfectly apt for a country of cringing toadies that elect the likes of Boris Johnson to power and allow themselves to be ruled over by a royal family that unapologetically protects its paedophile members.
The blue satin suit of the Gainsborough's blue boy seems to me to signify the supposed blue blood that runs through the veins of our self-appointed superiors. Nobody ever painted any of my ancestor's portraits.
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