This painting has an amusing backstory of rivalry. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the president of the Royal Academy of Arts and one of the most famous portrait painters of his time, had given a lecture at the academy on the use of warm and cool colors. Reynolds explained to his students that the use of cool colors, such as blue, should only be used in the background as a tool to support or set off the warm colors of the subject in the foreground. The story goes that his rival, Thomas Gainsborough, wanted to prove that such academic rules of art were usually nonsense. He painted 'The Blue Boy', a portrait of a youth wearing a blue costume, standing out against the warm brown background. It would later turn out that 'The Blue Boy' was painted about eight years prior to Reynolds discourse, so we might assume the story to have been somewhat exaggerated.