Gainsborough: The Pink Boy Conserved

A special display reveals it anew, freed from a discoloured varnish, alongside three other Waddesdon Gainsboroughs that depict boys in so-called ‘Van Dyck’ dress.

Gainsborough revered Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641)—the leading painter at Charles I’s court—considering him the supreme exponent of British portraiture, against whose measure contemporaries judged him. Gainsborough’s boys in ‘Vandyke’ dress—each of differing age and social class and painted for different purposes—play with the fluid relationship between clothing and identity.

The Pink Boy is a more youthful counterpart of the famous Blue Boy (which was on exceptional loan to The National Gallery, London until 15 May 2022 from the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California) and, like him, wearing an 18^th-century fancy-dress version of 17^th-century clothes.

‘The Pink Boy’ is as much a showpiece of Gainsborough’s skill, demonstrating his relationship to the art of the past as well as his modernity, as it is a portrait of the sitter, who is probably Master Francis Nicholls. It acquired its nickname in the 19^th-century, in the wake of The Blue Boy’s fame.

Portraits of Lord Alexander Douglas-Hamilton and Lord Archibald Hamilton demonstrate how Gainsborough used different types of ‘Vandyke’ costume and contrasting painting techniques to differentiate the relative rank and age of two aristocratic brothers. The portrait of the artist’s nephew and pupil Gainsborough Dupont is among his most intimate and scintillating works, conjuring the teenager’s individuality and inner consciousness as much as the shimmer of light on silk.