The Blue Boy

Gainsborough painted this young man around 1770, and dressed him in blue silk that was already a hundred years out of fashion. The slashed doublet and lace collar are a deliberate nod to Anthony van Dyck, the Flemish painter who had set the standard for English portraits a century before, and this was Gainsborough's first full-length go at that old costume. The sitter was long thought to be Jonathan Buttall, a well-off ironmonger's son, though nobody can now be sure. The painting's most dramatic moment came much later. In 1921 the Duke of Westminster sold it to the American railway magnate Henry Huntington for a record sum, and before it sailed for California it was hung briefly at the National Gallery in London, where ninety thousand people filed past to say goodbye to a picture the country was losing to America.