Shops BLUE BOY NEEDLEPOINT

This artful needlepoint/petit point of The Blue Boy is pretty kitsch! It came from a North Shore home that had a traditional vibe. The entire frame measures 29+3/4 x 23+3/4 while the visible art is 23+1/2 x 17+1/2. This frame gives it a classic look, but if you don't want it included, I can decrease the shipping charge.

WIKI HISTORY:
Perhaps Gainsborough's most famous work, it is thought to be a portrait of Jonathan Buttle (1752–1805), the son of a wealthy hardware merchant, although this has never been proven. It is a historical costume study as well as a portrait: the youth in his seventeenth-century apparel is regarded as Gainsborough's homage to Anthony van Dyck, and in particular is very close to Van Dyck's portrait of Charles II as a boy.

Gainsborough had already drawn something on the canvas before beginning The Blue Boy, which he painted over. The painting is about life-size, measuring 48 inches (1,200 mm) wide by 70 inches (1,800 mm) tall. Gainsborough painted the portrait in response to the advice of his rival Sir Joshua Reynolds, who had written:

It ought, in my opinion, to be indispensably observed, that the masses of light in a picture be always of a warm, mellow color, yellow, red, or a yellowish white, and that the blue, the grey, or the green colors be kept almost entirely out of these masses, and be used only to support or set off these warm colors; and for this purpose, a small proportion of cold color will be sufficient. Let shops this conduct be reversed; let the light be cold, and the surrounding color warm, as we often see in the works of the Roman and Florentine painters, and it will be out of the power of art, even in the hands of Rubens and Titian, to make a picture splendid and harmonious.