The Blue Boy at the National Gallery in 1922
(Picture: Courtesy of the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California)He’s back. Blue Boy, all in satin, his hand resting on his hip with tremendous assurance, has returned to London after a century, looking – it would seem – as good as new. For it is exactly 100 years tomorrow since Sir Thomas Gainsborough’s most famous painting left England for the US, having been sold to the Californian railway magnate, Henry E Huntington, for the then fabulous sum of £182,000. The deal was engineered by Joseph Duveen, the brilliant art dealer from Hull, thanks to whom a great many British and European masterpieces ended up on the wrong side of the Atlantic (do read SN Behrman’s hilarious biography of him, Duveen: The Most Spectacular Art Dealer of All Time).
Just before Blue Boy left for America, the painting was put on show in the National Gallery, where it attracted 90,000 visitors. The Times noted sadly, quoted in the room where the painting is now on show: “We have been to say ‘goodbye’ to a boy who is leaving England, in a day or two, forever. He received us dressed in a beautiful blue satin suit.” In an optimistic gesture, the National’s then director, Sir Charles Holmes, wrote on the reverse of the painting: “au revoir”. And now he’s here, back in the National Gallery, waiting to receive the crowds again.
