The Huntington’s most famous painting has returned home after a visit to its birthplace, exactly 100 years after coming to Los Angeles.

Melinda McCurdy is entrusted with one of the greatest art treasures in Southern California, if not the world. The curator of British art at The Huntington, it is her job to care for Thomas Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy” painting, which made its first public appearance in 1770.

For a centuries-old painting, it’s been very busy for the past several years and McCurdy and others at The Huntington have guided it through a restoration and the trip overseas.

They’ve celebrated the centennial of its acquisition by Henry Huntington (for $728,000 or the equivalent of $10 million in today’s money, the highest price ever paid for a painting at the time) by commissioning Kehinde Wiley to create a new painting reinterpreting it for today.

A life-size painting that has permeated our culture, inspiring a magazine, a pop song and the costume in a ride at Disneyland among others, it started life as “A Portrait of a Young Gentleman,” but by 1798, it was being called “The Blue Boy” because of the young man’s luminescent blue outfit.

“The painting is an image of a kind of an everyman in a way — a little young boy who is dressing up,” McCurdy said. “He’s got this performative quality about him. We can all imagine ourselves dressing up. Who didn’t pretend to be something they weren’t when they were younger? That’s sort of why the image connects with people.”

McCurdy wrote an essay about how the masterpiece transformed from being a British icon to a Southern California icon.

“Now it’s a part of the cultural landscape that we all live in,” McCurdy said. “Maybe it’s not quite as well known today as it would have been 25 or 30 years ago. When we did the conservation, we had people coming regularly to watch the progress. That said something to me about how the painting still does connect with people…A lot of people were really interested in what we were doing to this particular painting because they felt a strong connection to it. It is part of Southern California identity for better or for worse.”

In 2021, The Blue Boy took a trip to The National Gallery in London following its restoration. It was the first and only time the painting has been loaned. It returned this year and went back on display on June 11.

While it was gone, his place was taken by a new, commissioned work by Kehinde Wiley. The Huntington staff asked him to give a modern interpretation of the work. He was chosen in part because he used to come to the Huntington when he was a young boy himself, growing up in LA. It was the collection there that inspired him to become an artist.

“The Blue Boy was one of the paintings that he mentioned specifically as being an inspiration to him in developing his own artistic practice,” McCurdy said. “He talks about how he wanted to see people that look like himself.”

McCurdy said the relationship between the two works. She explains that from what we know about The Blue Boy, the figure in the painting wasn’t a commissioned painting, there wasn’t a sitter for it. Instead, it was meant to be a universalized image of youth.

“Kehinde Wiley being able to sort of replace the figure with a contemporary person is probably right up the alley of what that painting would have been all about,” McCurdy said.

While Blue Boy was gone, Wiley’s picture took its place, a stand-in for him with its blue and orange background and a Black man wearing a shirt with a firework burst of orange and a pair of blue shorts.

Now that Blue Boy has returned, Wiley’s portrait, “A Portrait of a Young Gentleman, 2021” is still in the same room, opposite the original. McCurdy says they’ll remain like that for the time being.

The Wiley is the first major 21st century painting in the Huntington Collection. The other two recent American works are more than 40 years old.

Wiley has become known for his large-scale vibrant paintings of Black people, often with the same sort of floral background seen in the Blue Boy-inspired portrait.

One of his more famous works was done in 2018 when former President Barack Obama sat for a portrait. He leans forward in painting with a background of flowers that speak to his history — chrysanthemums as the official flower of Chicago, jasmine for Hawaii and African blue lilies for Kenya. That work visited Los Angeles last November through January at the LACMA.