According to Hedquist, a formative episode was the so-called 'lavender scare' in the 1950s in which gay men and women were perceived to be threats to national security and were hounded from government office. How it was interpreted by its new host nation was also subject to the winds of cultural change. Marlene Dietrich dressed as Blue Boy for a comedy revue in Vienna in 1927, and Shirley Temple did the same for the film Curly Top in 1935.Īfter Blue Boy arrived in the US, it became famous, appearing on ceramics, textiles and thousands of reproduction prints.

In 1922, the year that Gainsborough's painting found a new home in the US, Cole Porter performed his musical Mayfair and Montmartre, in which Nelly Taylor dressed as Blue Boy and theatrically emerged from a frame singing a song called Blue Boy Blues. 'By the latter part of the 19th Century,' she explained, 'the magazines are just filled with pictures of girls dressed as Blue Boy.' This, for Hedquist, was the start of the 'feminisation' of Blue Boy. And these actors would frequently be girls. This began on stage in the 19th Century, where actors playing 'Little Boy Blue' in pantomimes were frequently dressed up in the silks, breeches and lace collar of Gainsborough's Blue Boy. But for Hedquist, the idea that the boy in the painting is dressing up in costume and acting is critical to his later reappraisals: 'the Blue Boy invites performance,' she says.