THEBLUEPAINTING

At the beginning of his 'real' painting career in 1971, Carl Barks made 27 finished oil paintings. The first 12 were Non-Disney works. Then he landed the Disney painting contract, resulting in an additional 15 paintings numbered from 13-71 to 27-71. In the start of this period Barks painted exclusively on standard coarse canvas, but starting with #25 he switched to the much smoother Masonite, that allowed him to add finer details. One of the duck paintings namely 21-71 stands out for two reasons: It was the first one to portray the characters in a posing mode instead of being reproductions of earlier comic book scenes, and it never received an official title! This is the story.

THE ORDER

Shortly after Barks had obtained the rights to paint Disney ducks from one of his good friends at the Walt Disney Corporation, George Sherman, he was contacted by Sherman's secretary, the 45-year old Norma Jean Clemens, who wrote and asked if Barks had intended to make pure reproductions of earlier stories, or if he could be persuaded to paint the duck characters in special situations. Barks wanted to please his new 'employers' and answered benevolently that he had no fixed rules lined up.
This caused Mrs. Clemens to personally order a special painting solely rendering Barks' own characters in a posing attitude. She paid the standard price of 150 dollars for the requested painting in January, 1972.

THE REFLECTIONS

At first Barks was contemplating producing the painting in the horizontal format and with another character lineup, but he ended up with the characters in the vertical format (size 16x20" (410x510mms)), which made him add the one-timer witchdoctor in order to balance the whole setup with Scrooge in the center.
Another stumbling block was the lighting, especially, of the Junior Woodchucks, whose heads should not be seen as equally white thus 'merging' them together, so Barks let the lighting of the scene take place from the left side of the painting, resulting in the characters having faces in slightly different shades of the same colours.
By choosing a dominating colour (blue) for the whole painting Barks also made it easier to 'part' the different elements in the scene. At the same time he could avoid the presence of shadows.

THE MOTIF

This was the first of several paintings that was not referring to a specific story scene or front cover. All the primary characters depicted in the painting are solely Barks' own inventions (which is why the otherwise obvious Donald Duck is not present). They are:
Little Helper, Gyro Gearloose, 3 representatives for the Beagle Boys, the nephews as Junior Woodchucks (Barks did not invent Huey, Dewey, and Louie as such), Gladstone Gander, Scrooge McDuck presenting his Number One Dime, Magica de Spell, and the witchdoctor from a Gearloose story. Flintheart Glomgold is present in a photograph.

In reality, the motif is rather strange to say the least! The characters are all standing peacefully besides each other - at nighttime to boot - and a portion of Scrooge's cash money has been dragged out into some undisclosed area of Duckburg - a fair bit from the safety of the Money Bin!
The background is totally unrealistic as well as a backdrop of Duckburg; we see two Moons, a couple of Larkies, and the top parts of an Arabian palace and an Asian pagoda. But all these ingredients were parts of earlier stories. Furthermore, the Money Bin changed appearance in every single of Barks' stories, and this was also the case in its depiction in his painting.

THE DIFFERENCES

Although the shown sketch is one of Barks' last before the actual painting session started, there are several points that were altered in the finished oil. Here are some of the more easily recognizable examples:
Little Helper is waving, Gyro has his eyes wide open, the Beagle Boys have prison numbers on their chests (pay special attention to the missing hyphen), the middle Boy has a gold tooth, the identical JWs have a different selection of medals on their respective chests, Scrooge's cane is held differently, the large money sack is considerably smaller, and an unframed photo of Glomgold has replaced the original framed photo of Barko the sled dog.

THE TITLES

Barks was never all that interested in titling his work. Most of his comic book stories have no titles at all, and when it came to paintings he had an easy time when he painted motifs from his stories and front covers; he simply copied the already used and generally adopted titles. But when he ventured out from this 'comfort zone', he would usually have difficulties titling the paintings that did not refer directly to former images.
Or maybe he just did not care! At least the bookings of certain titles are less than helpful, because they change merrily between his many notebooks.

As was the case with the painting at hand. In the production journal the painting is called Blue composition of ducks, in two reference sheets the title is Blue Dux and Blue Ducks respectively, in the reference book is was changed to McDuck in Blue, and in the receipt book it is booked as McDuck Composition in Blue. So in reality the painting is rendered nameless! Take your pick for a title...