Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture

Thomas Gainsborough, Mary, Countess Howe, 1763–64, English Heritage, Kenwood House, London; © Historic England / Bridgeman Images

Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture is The Frick Collection’s first special exhibition dedicated to the English artist Thomas Gainsborough, and the first devoted to his portraiture ever held in New York. Displaying more than two dozen paintings, the show explores the richly interwoven relationship between Gainsborough’s portraits and fashion in the eighteenth century. The works included represent some of the greatest achievements from every stage of this period-defining artist’s career, drawn from the Frick’s holdings and from collections across North America and the United Kingdom.

The trappings and trade of fashion filled Gainsborough’s world—in magazines and tailor shops, at the opera and on promenades—and his portraits were at the heart of it all. This exhibition invites visitors to consider not only the clothing the artist depicted in his paintings, but also the role of his canvases as both records of and players in the larger conception of fashion: encompassing everything from class, wealth, labor, and craft to formality, intimacy, and time. Recent technical investigations also shed light on Gainsborough’s artistic process, including connections to materials—textiles, dyes, cosmetics, jewelry—that fueled the fashion industry.

Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture is organized by Aimee Ng, the museum’s Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator. Stated Ng, “The spectacular and at times, to modern eyes, absurd fashions in portraits by Thomas Gainsborough continue to fascinate viewers today. The appeal of these demonstrations of taste, status, and wealth persists in tension with increased recognition, over the last few decades, of the injustices that made such extravagance possible. This exhibition necessarily deals with clothing and personal attire, while exploring how fashion was understood in Gainsborough’s time, how it touched every level of society, and how portraiture itself was as much a construction and invention as a sitter’s style.”

THEMATIC THREADS

Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture explores numerous themes threading through the artist’s career, as well as the expansive layers of meaning that fashion held in his time.

Three early works in the show represent the painter’s innovations in the so-called “conversation piece”—including the exceptional loan of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews—which allowed Gainsborough to practice his beloved landscape painting while satisfying the fashionable conventions of what he called the “curs’d Face Business.”

Other works exemplify society portraits’ power to depict subjects not only as fashionable, but as people “of fashion,” which carried deeper meanings of reputation and honorability. In Mary, Countess Howe, Gainsborough meticulously documents every element of a new aristocrat’s attire, while men’s trappings often more readily communicated profession and status, such as a Royal Navy captain’s gold-trimmed uniform.

The exhibition also considers how portraiture both reinforced and challenged social hierarchies, especially for sitters on the margins of the Georgian era’s fashionable class. Among the dukes and duchesses we find portraits of Gainsborough himself and his family members; actors, musicians, and an eccentric inventor; the unrecognized Catholic wife of the Prince of Wales; and even a dog and her puppy.

In one salient pairing, visitors will encounter portraits of Mary, Duchess of Montagu (ca. 1768, Duke of Buccleuch, Bowhill House), and her servant, Ignatius Sancho (1768, National Gallery of Canada). The latter, born into enslavement, became a celebrated composer and one of the most famous Afro-Britons of his time; in his likeness, the artist dresses him in the coat and waistcoat of a gentleman, not in the livery he donned in the Montagu household.

Visitors will also learn about Gainsborough’s use of “Van Dyck dress,” which evokes the Old Master painter from a century earlier. While a copy after Van Dyck is included alongside Bernard Howard, Later 12th Duke of Norfolk (1788, His Grace, the Duke of Norfolk, Arundel Castle, Sussex)—whose billowing black costume emulates his noble ancestors—the style also elevated those without such a legacy, notably the scandal-ridden Grace Dalrymple Elliott.

Finally, portraits could even mark time, from shifting trends to the social “seasons” in London and Bath to youth and aging. Technical examinations reveal Gainsborough’s fascinating practice of reworking pictures, whether to commemorate an unexpected death—as in Mrs. Samuel Moody and Her Sons, Samuel and Thomas (ca. 1799, reworked ca. 1784, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London)—or to update styles like that of Mrs. Sheridan, whose initial portrayal as a shepherdess was reworked years later, when the pastoral look no longer suited her.

PUBLIC PROGRAMMING

The exhibition will be complemented by a robust schedule of public programs, from lectures this winter and spring by Ng and other speakers, a conversation between Ng and fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi in connection with their Frick Diptych volume (see below), a symposium on art and fashion, a pair of seminars, and art-making programs both online and in person