ICONIC “BLUE BOY” GETS A MAJOR MAKEOVER
CALIF.» “Blue Boy” is SAN MARINO, getting a longawaited 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) just 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 soughtout attractions at Southern California’s Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens since its arrival in 1921.
But it hasn’t had a substantial restoration in at least 97 years. Over time it’s 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 21stcentury tools to restore an 18thcentury masterpiece. She had 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 had numerous digital Xradiography and infrared reflectography images of the work that she’s been compiling and studying over the past year. And, of course, there was paint created to match what Gainsborough was using circa 1770.
With all that at her disposal, she expects to have “Project Blue Boy” completed about this time next year and the kid back on the Huntington’s Thornton Gallery wall, alongside other stunning portraits from the era, 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 will stop to explain ittothem.
This is “Blue Boy,” so O’connell will take her time. When the Huntington’s founder, railroad tycoon Henry Huntington, bought “Blue Boy” in 1921, he paid a thenrecord sum of $728,000.