This identification has never been proven and as Susan Sloman argued in 2013, the likely sitter is Gainsborough's nephew, Gainsborough Dupont (1754–1797). One of Gainsborough's best known works, The Blue Boy was long thought to be a portrait of Jonathan Buttall (1752–1805), the son of a wealthy hardware merchant, because of his early ownership of the painting. 1770) is a full-length portrait in oil by Thomas Gainsborough, owned by The Huntington in San Marino, California. Huntington Art Gallery, San Marino, California For other uses, see The Blue Boy (disambiguation). ![]() Behind her, soft washes of pink, lilac, yellow, green and coral fill the background.This article is about the Gainsborough painting. Her fan is composed of thick splashes of white and peach, with splotches of violets and greens. She wears long gloves painted in green, speckled with pink details resembling embroidery. The woman leans back in a chair, holding what appears to be an open fan. Just below her bottom lip is a short strip of light green – below that, another slash of pink defines her chin. The curve of her upper lip is tomato red her bottom lip is a slash of peachy pink. A long, green vertical streak defines her nose, with a small blob of pale yellow marking its tip. Her forehead is marked by a horizontal green smear, possibly the shadow from the brim of her hat. We know she was a Caucasian French woman, but here, her face is rendered in streaks of green, and blots of gray, mauves, and yellows. The woman’s red hair is pulled up, a small patch peeking out from under the wide brim of her hat. The colors might represent flowers or feathers in her hat. It is topped with exuberant puffs of oranges, greens and blues, swirling around each other. The wide blue brim sits straight across her forehead. Her giant hat dwarfs her it is nearly twice the size of her face. The woman is seated in profile with her face turned toward us. Her face anchors the center, and her dress fills the bottom. The woman’s enormous hat fills the upper third of the canvas. The painting is just over 2 and a half feet tall and almost 2 feet wide. His signature is in the top left corner of the canvas. This is Femme au Chapeau, or Woman with a Hat, a vertical portrait of a woman made with patches of wild color and rough, energetic brushstrokes. And he replied, facetiously or not, “Well, black, of course.” Matisse was purportedly asked what his wife would actually have been wearing when she posed. ![]() To use this bold slash of green across his wife’s forehead, a slash of green for her nose, you know, this dab of yellow at-at its tip. But it was one thing to do that with a landscape, for instance but to do that for a woman’s face was really utterly shocking. He had been painting with a sort of non-objective palette, using colors that didn’t correspond to observed reality. But many viewers of his day couldn’t accept Matisse’s riotous colors, and the raw, loose way he applied paint. The moniker stuck, and today many artists and scholars consider the work of these so-called “Fauvists” to be a turning point in the development of a modern art. ![]() And the-the critical reaction was-was strong, and one of the critics, Louis Vauxcelles, referred to this painting and paintings by Matisse’s colleagues as les fauves, or wild beasts. And when his colleagues and the salon president saw the piece, they had encouraged him not to show it, for fear that he would really embarrass himself by putting this on public view. So this painting was actually made in-in some haste. Matisse had been working on a very large landscape at the time and didn’t think that he could finish it. Curator Janet Bishop gives the full story. But it caused a commotion in 1905, when the Paris art world came face to face with the bold colors of modern painting in the great annual exhibition, the Autumn Salon. Femme au Chapeau, or Woman with a Hat, is a portrait of Henri Matisse’s wife, Amelie, and is today one of the best known works of art in the Museum’s collection.
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