Pinkie & Blue Boy
Pinkie is the traditional title for a portrait made in 1794 by Thomas Lawrence in the permanent collection of the Huntington Library at San Marino, California where it hangs opposite The Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough.
Pinkie and The Blue Boy as a couple are the result of time-worn perception and assumption. Painted by two different artists in two different decades Pinkie and Blue were never meant to be together.
It wasn’t until the 1920’s, roughly 150 years after they were painted, that this romantic perception took hold thanks to American railroad tycoon and enthusiastic art collector Henry Edwards Huntington. Purchased in England during the American heyday of British portraiture, Huntington brought these two paintings across the ocean to California where he placed them in his library opposite one another.
