Focus on this artwork and analyze the Relationship to The Blue Boy.
Pinkie owes part of its notability to its association with the Gainsborough portrait The Blue Boy. According to Patricia Failing, author of Best-Loved Art from American Museums, "no other work by a British artist enjoys the fame of The Blue Boy." Pinkie and The Blue Boy are often paired in popular esteem; some gallery visitors mistake them for contemporaneous works by the same artist. The two were created by different painters a quarter century apart, however, and the dress styles of the subjects are separated by more than one-hundred fifty years. Jonathan Buttall, who posed for Gainsborough's portrait, wears a period costume of the early seventeenth century as an homage to Flemish Baroque painter Anthony van Dyck, whom Gainsborough held in particular esteem. Sarah Moulton wears the contemporary fashion of 1794. The faces and gaze of the boy and girl are perhaps similar enough for them to be thought brother and sister, but the two works had no association until Henry Huntington purchased them in the 1920s.Nonetheless, the two are so well matched that William Wilson, author of The Los Angeles Times Book of California Museums, calls them "the Romeo and Juliet of Rococo portraiture" and notes that their association borders on cliché:They have decorated cocktail coasters, appeared in advertisements, and stopped the show as the tableaux vivants at the Laguna Beach 'Pageant of the Masters.' For all that, they remain intrinsically lovely…
The continuing popularity of both pictures is based on more than the obvious. The subjects certainly are in the springtime of life, but their freshness is lent a certain poignancy by the rather grown-up garb that suggests both the transience of youth and the attempt to cling to it. Besides, both are extraordinarily fine pictures, easy and dramatic at once.
Rococo Anthony van Dyck Flemish Baroque painter The Blue Boy Pageant of the Masters Romeo and Juliet portrait Los Angeles Times