Beloved painting to get makeover
Senior paintings conservator Christina O’Connell uses a surgical microscope to examine English painter Thomas Gainsborough’s circa-1770 painting nicknamed “Blue Boy” at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif., on Thursday.
SAN MARINO, Calif. — “Blue Boy” is getting a long-awaited makeover, and the public can watch as one of the world’s most recognizable paintings gets a little nip here, a nice tuck there and some splashes of fresh paint (blue presumably) in time for the eternally youthful adolescent to mark his 250th birthday.
Thomas Gainsborough’s stunning oil on canvas featuring a British youth dressed nearly all in blue has been one of the most sought-out attractions at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens outside Los Angeles since its arrival in 1921.
But it hasn’t had a substantial restoration in at least the 97 years since, and over time it has become a bit torn and tattered, some of its colors have faded and, worse still, some of its paint is beginning to flake.
The Huntington’s senior paintings conservator, Christina O’Connell, went to work Saturday armed with an array of 21st century tools to restore an 18th century masterpiece.
She has a microscope that, at 6 feet, is taller than she is and can zoom in on the painting’s smallest details and magnify them 25 times. She has numerous digital X-radiography and infrared reflectography images of the work that she has been compiling and studying for a year. And, of course, there is paint created to match what Gainsborough was using circa 1770.
With all that at her disposal, she expects to have “Project Blue Boy” completed in about a year and the kid back on The Huntington’s Thornton Gallery wall, alongside other stunning portraits from the era, sometime in early 2020.
As O’Connell toils in the same area where “Blue Boy” has hung for nearly a century, visitors will be able to walk up and watch what she’s doing. And, during occasional breaks, she’ll stop to explain it to them.
“One of the reasons why the painting hasn’t undergone such an extensive conservation treatment before was because people always wanted to keep it on view. So this is a way to address the conservation needs of the painting while keeping it on view — so the visitors won’t miss him,” she said with a smile last week.
Although Gainsborough, one of the greatest British painters of the 18th century, is renowned as a master of the brush, O’Connell said she won’t be nervous while taking up her own brush to add touches — inpainting, it’s called — to replace what the painting has lost to the ravages of time.
“We’re dealing with a lot of the usual suspects when it comes to a painting this age, as far as condition issues are concerned,” she said. She added that she has repaired much worse, including a painting that was handed to her in pieces.