Lesson 49

Boy Revolutionary

 

In painting, warm colours come forward and cold colours recede.

Putting red in the foreground, green in the middle and blue in the distance was Joshua Reynolds’ rules for creating illusionistic space in painting. Essentially a crude and simplified form of aerial perspective.

Gainsborough painted the Blue Boy in part as a snub to Reynolds. By putting blue in the foreground Gainsborough broke these academic rules. This brush-off to Reynolds showed that it could be done and such academic rules did not matter.

Though today the Blue Boy seems a rather conventional painting, the ‘blue’ was revolutionary at the time.