Portrait of The Jonathan Buttall was made by the famous British portrait painting master Thomas Gainsborough, which is now preserved in the Huntington Library in Los Angeles. This painting was used to deny Reynolds’s point of "blue can not occupy the main status in the painting".
Portrait of The Jonathan Buttall
Portrait of The Jonathan Buttall depicted an aristocratic youth image with gorgeous clothes. In fact, this model prototype was not the noble, but the artist found a wealthy industrialist's son. Gainsborough let him wear the blue clothes and dressed like the prince. With bold strokes and smooth tones, Gainsborough incisively showed the youth's demeanor, giving full play to the role of the color blue. This novel blue tone did not produce any discomfort, but to make people feel surprised; this lively and jumping blue silk, the drapery and high light with unpredictable changes, the extraordinary blue tone, the changing background with ash yellow, blue ash, green ash and red ash formed a wonderful harmonious comparison. Here the most successful was that the painter used the very accurate color to reproduce the fabric texture and thin soft feeling in the youth's blue stain. The style of the painting was fresh with rich sense of rhythm, so that the painting had become one of the most distinguished portraits in 18th century and occupied an important page in the world art history. As one critic described, the painter made the portrait painting as charming as the opera; this was "a truth through the artificial processing".
Compared to the prominent academic painter Reynolds, Gainsborough was not talented. But it was his exploration in art, free and unemotional personality and struggle for the authority that allowed him to make a breakthrough on the road of art. Gainsborough drew the portraits for the nobles for 40 years, and was recognized as the laurel painter. But he sometimes got tired of painting portraits and often went to the field to draw landscape paintings which were the second interest in his life. In landscape paintings, Gainsborough's artistic achievements were also obvious.
