Introduction

Portraits were the most popular type of painting in eighteenth-century Britain. Through them, painters and their subjects could shape, invent, and assert identities, social status, and alliances. Portraits were exchanged as gifts and displayed at public exhibitions, and they became a topic of avid criticism in daily newspapers. Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) rose from modest origins in rural Suffolk to become one of the most sought-after portraitists of his day, eventually gaining the patronage of King George III and his family.

In Gainsborough's time, industries of fashion touched nearly every aspect of society in Britain and its colonies. As a concept, fashion was understood differently than it is today, carrying explicit associations to making and manufacture, to sequence and time, and to social class. According to Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755), the word fashion connoted a rank below nobility but above the "vulgar." For "people of fashion," what one wore in a portrait mattered as much as who painted it and how. The form, mood, and maker of a portrait could go in and out of style just as clothing did. One of the most fashionable painters of his day, Gainsborough also explored the power of portraiture to subvert the rigid rules of British social class.

The first exhibition in New York devoted to the artist's portraits, Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture showcases the highest achievements of each stage of his career-from his early work in Suffolk to his rise to fame in the fashionable spa town of Bath to his final chapter in London, where he capitalized on the signature style that makes his portraits so recognizable. A century after his death, the fashion for portraits by Gainsborough and his contemporaries reached new heights as American collectors—like the Fricks, Vanderbilts, Mellons, and Huntingtons—paid unprecedented sums to bring them across the Atlantic.