A Portrait of a Young Gentleman

Maker Kehinde Wiley (American, born 1977)

Collections

ClassificationsPAINTINGS

Date2021

Mediumoil on linen

Dimensionscanvas: 70 1/2 × 49 1/8 in. (179.1 × 124.8 cm.) frame: 87 × 64 × 5 1/4 in. (221 × 162.6 × 13.3 cm.)

Credit LineCollection of The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens; Commissioned through Roberts Projects, Los Angeles; Gift of Anne F. Rothenberg, Terry Perucca and Annette Serrurier, and the Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation. Additional support was provided by Laura and Carlton Seaver, Kent Belden and Dr. Louis Re, and Faye and Robert Davidson.

Label TextKehinde Wiley’s "A Portrait of a Young Gentleman" glows. The sitter wears a tie-dye shirt and Vans sneakers, and he was likely scouted and street cast near the artist’s studio in Dakar, the coastal capital of Senegal. This beachy, cool young gentleman echoes his counterpart: Thomas Gainsborough’s "The Blue Boy" (21.1), painted some 250 years earlier, in The Huntington’s collection. The paintings are exactly the same size and are set into identical frames—one gilt and the other painted black. Wiley’s model, with his hand on his hip and a hat in hand, borrows Blue Boy’s stance. Wiley makes us see that self-fashioning, pomp, and posturing are qualities not only of eighteenth-century English society, but also of contemporary street fashion and global black culture. While Gainsborough’s figure stands in a landscape setting, Wiley’s model is ensconced in a field of psychedelic flowers, which both surround and obscure him. The floral background is based on a William Morris wallpaper pattern, similar to those in The Huntington’s collections.

Kehinde Wiley is best known for his Presidential portrait of Barack Obama. The Huntington commissioned the artist to make a painting for the one hundredth anniversary of The Blue Boy’s purchase by Henry and Arabella Huntington in 1921. Wiley’s connection to The Huntington is personal. As a kid growing up in Los Angeles, he used to come to room where The Blue Boy is usually displayed, the Thornton Portrait Gallery, where he fell in love with the style of British grand manner portraits. But he also noticed the people in these pictures did not look like him. His artistic practice seeks to rectify this absence of Black and Brown subjects in art history, appropriating and remixing elements historically reserved for the wealthy, White, and powerful. It is at once a love letter to art history—and a critique of it.

Status

On view

Object number2021.7