In the fall of 2023, the Frick Collection in New York staged a beguilingly beautiful show of Barkley L. Hendricks portraits surrounded by the Old Master paintings that so inspired him. This decidedly contemporary exhibition was especially fitting for the museum’s temporary space, dubbed Frick Madison, at the Brutalist Breuer Building, now occupied by Sotheby’s.
Two and a half years (and one grand homecoming) later, the Frick is going back to its roots by spotlighting one of the 18th-century portraitists that enchanted both Hendricks and the museum’s founder, Henry Clay Frick: Thomas Gainsborough. From February 12 through May 11, 2026, the Frick presents “Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture” in its recently inaugurated Ronald S. Lauder Exhibition Galleries.
For fans of the Frick, which houses more than 10 works by Gainsborough, it may come as a surprise that this exhibition marks the museum’s first on the English artist—not to mention New York’s first devoted to his portraiture. Gainsborough’s wispy yet regal figures have long been fixtures in great British country houses, and during the Gilded Age, American collectors clamored to acquire them to imbue their homes with a sense of history and prestige.
Attitudes toward British portraiture, especially in this country, have changed considerably over the years according to Aimee Ng, the Frick’s Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator. “An 18th-century British painting has, in some ways, come to be seen—at least in this country, and by certain generations—as dusty old pictures of dusty rich people benefiting from colonization and enslaved labor,” Ng told audiences at the exhibition’s press preview on February 10. “While this is an indisputable part of this history, and an important part, there are so many human stories to tell about Gainsborough’s world and the crucial place and power of portraits in it.”
In conceiving the show over the last decade, Ng tells Vogue that her goal was to “reintroduce the artist in a way that acknowledges the complexity of the social world he and his sitters lived in and the role of portraits in that social world.” Portraiture was the most popular form of painting in 18th-century Britain, and it hinged on fashion—though people had a somewhat different understanding of the word then. “The more I dug into concepts of fashion in the 18th century, and Georgian Britain in particular, I was amazed at how fashion was so different conceptually than it is today. It had specific and explicit associations with social class,” says the curator, noting that in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) a “fashionable” person was defined as “having rank above the vulgar, and below nobility.” Ng continues, “There are associations with fashion in Gainsborough’s world that have, in a sense, been lost to us. Fashion was a much broader concept that had many more human-life implications.”
To demonstrate the roles clothing and class played in Gainsborough’s world, Ng whittled down some 700 works by the artist to 25 exemplary portraits. The exhibition begins with a grouping of works made while Gainsborough was still living in the English countryside. In Peter Darnell Muilman, Charles Crokatt, and William Keable (ca. 1750), the three subjects—Muilman and Crokatt, sons of wealthy immigrant families, and Keable, a local Suffolk painter and musician who may have been their teacher—appear to the modern eye as virtually indistinguishable. Upon closer inspection, however, Keable, the central figure, lacks the gold trim on his coat and is not wearing a powdered wig, indicating he is of a lower social class than the others.
These “conversation pieces,” as they were known, were small-scale group portraits popular from the 1720s through the 1750s, and they reflect the artist’s penchant for depicting landscapes and portraits. Despite referring to the latter as the “curs’d Face Business,” portraiture would become Gainsborough’s calling card, even leading to the patronage of King George III and Queen Charlotte. The artist eventually moved to the larger port city of Ipswich before establishing himself in Bath in 1759. With its healing thermal waters, Bath attracted a fashionable clientele akin to London, where Gainsborough moved in 1774. But in this spa town, where for a few years he worked beside his sister’s millinery shop (quite the clever business model), Gainsborough’s portraits gained a new monumentality and aura.
“You can always tell a Gainsborough as a Gainsborough, which is not always the case from your [George] Romneys, [John] Hoppners, and Reynolds, because of his webby brushwork,” says Ng; scholars have described Gainsborough’s inimitable style as a “gossamer web of sheer paint.” Indeed, Gainsborough portraits have a ghostly, enigmatic quality to them, as exemplified by The Hon. Frances Duncombe (ca. 1776), an icon of the Frick’s Dining Room that enthralled both Ng and Isaac Mizrahi when they were teenagers visiting the museum. “She was probably the great catalyst for even wanting to think about Gainsborough more deeply,” says Ng of the young heiress clad in pearls and gleaming blue satin, evoking the artist’s famed portrait The Blue Boy. The painting also reflects Gainsborough’s embrace of 17th-century Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck’s style, which privileged dramatically lit garments. On the occasion of this exhibition, the Frick has released its latest in its Diptych book series, inviting contemporary luminaries to pen essays on single masterpieces from its collection. In this new volume, Ng and Mizrahi pay tribute to “the blue woman,” as the fashion designer dotingly calls Duncombe, whom the two will discuss in a public talk at the Frick in March.
Ng says that in analyzing Gainsborough’s correspondence with his sitters, it was clear “how crucial clothing was to his conception of a successful portrait.” While the Royal Academy (whose first president was Reynolds) urged painters to use classical or timeless dress in their portraits to dignify sitters and prevent them from looking outdated, Gainsborough insisted that contemporary fashion was necessary for depicting likeness—so much so that he’d offer to update a portrait years after its completion. X-ray evidence has since revealed the extent of Gainsborough’s sartorial upgrades. For example, a portrait of celebrity Elizabeth Linley (later Sheridan) as a shepherdess long thought to be lost was later discovered to be under the current Mrs. Sheridan (probably 1783, altered between 1785 and 1787) portrait—a testament to pastoral fashion falling out of favor.
Gainsborough was also subversive in the breadth of his sitters, as illustrated by two particularly painterly reunions in the show. The first pairs Mary, Duchess of Montagu (ca. 1768) with Ignatius Sancho (1768), Gainsborough’s only portrait of a Black sitter. Born on a slave ship, Sancho was eventually hired as the Duchess’s husband’s valet, but he was also an accomplished composer, musician, writer, and abolitionist. Rather than painting him in his Montagu livery, Gainsborough immortalizes him as a gentleman, posed with his hand tucked into his waistcoat. “Gainsborough’s paintings reveal how identities can be very multivalent,” says Ng, noting that the artist frequently exchanged his paintings for music lessons and instruments, as was possibly the case with this portrait.
Two paintings of the striking Grace Dalrymple Elliott—the Frick’s bust-length composition (1782) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s full-length portrait (1778)—have also been united for the first time (despite living just 11 blocks from one another). The paintings, which seemingly glorify a woman known for her scandalous affairs, caused quite a stir when first revealed to the public. “Critics protested what they deemed to be inappropriate social mixing on the exhibition wall—that a painting of a scandalous courtesan could hang on the same wall as a noblewoman, both dressed and posed similarly,” said Ng at the Frick’s press preview. “Fashion in portraits was dangerous in this way. It could blur the lines of the British social class system, turning a servant into a gentleman and a courtesan into a duchess.”
Speaking of sartorial scandal, this April the Frick will take on one of history’s most infamous subjects in an accompanying exhibition, “Ruffles Ribbons: Fashion Plates from the Time of Marie Antoinette.” The display of 24 hand-colored engravings will convey the international influence of French fashion during the late 18th century, which inevitably enraptured many of Gainsborough’s sitters. Yet whether his figures are clad in the latest fashions or more timeless ensembles, today it is the quality of his distinctive brushwork that renders them eternally alluring.







