Thomas Gainsborough · c. 1770
The Blue Boy
Posters from $15.00 CAD · Canvas from $39.00 CAD
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A full-length portrait of a boy in a shimmering blue satin Van Dyck costume with a lace collar, a plumed hat in his right hand, standing before a stormy sky and a dark wooded landscape. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino.
Up to 8 × 11.6 in · portrait
Size
Larger sizes are unavailable for this painting because the source scan's resolution wouldn't print at gallery quality.
Format & finish
Archival cotton canvas stretched over a wooden frame. Ready to hang as-is. No external frame.
Scale next to a 5'10" person
+ tax at checkout
Materials & quality
›Canvas & inks
Giclée-printed on archival cotton canvas with fade-resistant pigment inks, hand-stretched over wooden bars. Gallery-wrapped — ready to hang with no extra frame needed.
›Floater frame
Hand-finished solid wood floater frame in five finishes. The canvas sits inside with a clean shadow gap — the way galleries hang contemporary canvas.
›Posters
Premium archival paper — 200 gsm soft matte or 230 gsm vibrant glossy. Ships flat or rolled, ready for your own frame.
›Faithful to the source
Printed from the highest-resolution museum and archive scans available. Each painting's maximum size is capped at what its source scan can support at gallery quality.
The story of The Blue Boy
Painted about 1770, The Blue Boy shows a youth in seventeenth-century costume, Gainsborough's homage to the portraits of Anthony van Dyck. The sitter was long said to be Jonathan Buttall, a hardware merchant's son; in 2013 the scholar Susan Sloman proposed the painter's nephew Gainsborough Dupont instead. A story put about in 1821 claimed it was painted to refute Joshua Reynolds's advice against cool colours dominating a picture, but the painting is some eight years older than the lecture in question. Henry E. Huntington bought it in 1921 and it left Britain for California in 1922; a hundred years later to the day, on 25 January 2022, it went back on show at the National Gallery in London for a five-month loan.
Adapted from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Thomas Gainsborough
Thomas Gainsborough was an English portrait and landscape painter, draughtsman, and printmaker. Along with his rival Sir Joshua Reynolds, he is considered one of the most important British artists of the second half of the 18th century. He painted quickly, and the works of his maturity are characterised by a light palette and easy strokes.
All Thomas Gainsborough prints →Biography adapted from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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