Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture

Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture explores the relationship between works by period-defining English artist Thomas Gainsborough and fashion, a concept and industry that touched nearly every aspect of British society in the eighteenth century. The artist’s painted images were subject to the same forces of fashion as the people they depict. Like the cut and cloth of a jacket, the shape, size, and facture of a painted portrait could be avant-garde or passé. In Gainsborough’s world, the trappings, trade, and power of fashion were everywhere—from magazines to tailor shops, from the opera to promenades—and his portraits were at the heart of it all.

The museum’s first special exhibition dedicated to the artist—and the first devoted to Gainsborough’s portraiture ever held in New York—this show brings together over two dozen of Gainsborough’s most spectacular portraits from across North America and the United Kingdom, representing each stage of his four-decade career.

Technical investigations conducted in collaboration with conservators at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Yale Center for British Art will also shed light on Gainsborough’s artistic process and materials, exploring connections between his practice and goods that fueled the fashion industry—from dyes, pigments, and cosmetics to textiles and jewelry.

This exhibition is organized by Aimee Ng, the Frick’s Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, and is complemented by a richly illustrated catalogue and robust calendar of programs.