[4] On 16 November 1793 Sarah's grandmother, Judith Barrett, wrote from Jamaica to her niece Elizabeth Barrett Williams, then living on Richmond Hill in Surrey, asking her to commission a portrait of 'my dear little Pinkey ... as I cannot gratify my self with the Original, I must beg the favour of You to have her picture drawn at full Length by one of the best Masters, in an easy Careless attitude'.

Sarah probably began sitting for Lawrence, painter-in-ordinary to George III, at his studio in Old Bond Street soon after the receipt of this letter on 11 February 1794.

[5] According to an official Huntington Library publication: Many of the finest works by the most gifted English artists of the period were large formal portraits.

According to Patricia Failing, author of Best-Loved Art from American Museums, "no other work by a British artist enjoys the fame of The Blue Boy.

[8][9] The faces and gaze of the boy and girl are perhaps similar enough for them to be thought brother and sister, but the two works had no association until Henry Huntington purchased them in the 1920s.

[10] Nonetheless, the two are so well matched that William Wilson, author of The Los Angeles Times Book of California Museums, calls them "the Romeo and Juliet of Rococo portraiture" and notes that their association borders on cliché: They have decorated cocktail coasters, appeared in advertisements, and stopped the show as the tableaux vivants at the Laguna Beach 'Pageant of the Masters.'

The subjects certainly are in the springtime of life, but their freshness is lent a certain poignancy by the rather grown-up garb that suggests both the transience of youth and the attempt to cling to it.

[12] Pinkie can be seen hanging on a wall of Gus Fring's apartment, opposite the bathroom entrance, in the Better Call Saul episode "Black and Blue."

In the film Joker, Pinkie and Blue Boy are both seen hanging on the wall of Arthur and Penny Fleck's apartment near the television set.