Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture
Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture
Frick to Present New York’s First Exhibition on the English Artist’s Portraiture
February 12 through May 11, 2026
New York (November 3, 2025) — Beginning February 12, 2026, The Frick Collection will present its 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 will explore 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 the artist’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 actual clothing the painter depicted, 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 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 and his contemporaries 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 often 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.”
EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
The exhibition will be complemented by a richly illustrated catalogue authored by Ng, with an additional essay by Kari Rayner, Associate Conservator of Paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum.
Along with entries for each work in the show, the catalogue features essays on portraiture and self-fashioning in Gainsborough’s era, on materials and techniques that linked clothing and paintings, and on the roles of class and time in eighteenth-century style. The volume considers how and why Gainsborough and his sitters—from dukes and duchesses to the artist’s family members to the once-enslaved writer and composer Ignatius Sancho—shaped how they would be immortalized in paint. The book also touches on the longstanding appeal of Gainsborough’s art, particularly its renewed popularity a century after the painter’s death among American collectors such as the Fricks, Vanderbilts, and Huntingtons.
The 200-page hardcover volume is published by Rizzoli Electa in association with The Frick Collection ($50; Frick members: $40 in-store, $45 online). The book will be available for purchase in the Frick’s Museum and Exhibition Shops, online at shop.frick.org, or by contacting shop@frick.org or 212.547.6849.
The exhibition catalogue is funded by Dr. Tai-Heng Cheng.
EXHIBITION SUPPORT
Major support for Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture is provided by an anonymous donor in honor of Ian Wardropper.
Additional funding is provided by Barbara and Bradford Evans, Kathleen Feldstein, Michael and Jane Horvitz, Dr. Arlene P. McKay, The Helen Clay Frick Foundation, James K. Kloppenburg, David and Kate Bradford, Katie von Strasser – InspiratumColligere, the Dr. Lee MacCormick Edwards Charitable Foundation, Edward Lee Cave, Mr. and Mrs. Hubert L. Goldschmidt, Jennifer Schnabl, the Malcolm Hewitt Wiener Foundation, Bradley Isham Collins and Amy Fine Collins, Siri and Bob Marshall, Bailey Foote, Alexander Mason Hankin, Brittany Beyer Harwin and Zachary Harwin, and Otto Naumann and Heidi D. Shafranek.
Image: Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788), Mary, Countess Howe, 1763–64, oil on canvas, 94 15/16 × 60 3/4 in. (243.2 × 154.3 cm), English Heritage, Kenwood House, London © Historic England / Bridgeman Images