{"id":288240,"date":"2026-02-12T22:07:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T22:07:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/288240\/"},"modified":"2026-02-12T22:07:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-12T22:07:09","slug":"a-new-show-at-the-frick-examines-the-fashionable-world-of-thomas-gainsborough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/288240\/","title":{"rendered":"A New Show at the Frick Examines the Fashionable World of Thomas Gainsborough"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the fall of 2023, the Frick Collection in New York staged a beguilingly beautiful show of Barkley L. Hendricks<\/a> portraits surrounded by the Old Master paintings that so inspired him. This decidedly contemporary exhibition was especially fitting for the museum\u2019s temporary space, dubbed Frick Madison, at the Brutalist Breuer Building, now occupied by Sotheby\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Two and a half years (and one grand homecoming<\/a>) later, the Frick is going back to its roots by spotlighting one of the 18th-century portraitists that enchanted both Hendricks and the museum\u2019s founder, Henry Clay Frick: Thomas Gainsborough. From February 12 through May 11, 2026, the Frick presents \u201cGainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture\u201d<\/a> in its recently inaugurated Ronald S. Lauder Exhibition Galleries.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/p>\n

Installation view of \u201cGainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture\u201d at the Frick Collection<\/p>\n

Photo: Joseph Coscia Jr.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s first on the English artist\u2014not to mention New York\u2019s first devoted to his portraiture. Gainsborough\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Attitudes toward British portraiture, especially in this country, have changed considerably over the years according to Aimee Ng, the Frick\u2019s Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator. \u201cAn 18th-century British painting has, in some ways, come to be seen\u2014at least in this country, and by certain generations\u2014as dusty old pictures of dusty rich people benefiting from colonization and enslaved labor,\u201d Ng told audiences at the exhibition\u2019s press preview on February 10. \u201cWhile this is an indisputable part of this history, and an important part, there are so many human stories to tell about Gainsborough\u2019s world and the crucial place and power of portraits in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In conceiving the show over the last decade, Ng tells Vogue that her goal was to \u201creintroduce 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.\u201d Portraiture was the most popular form of painting in 18th-century Britain, and it hinged on fashion\u2014though people had a somewhat different understanding of the word then. \u201cThe 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,\u201d says the curator, noting that in Samuel Johnson\u2019s Dictionary (1755) a \u201cfashionable\u201d person was defined as \u201chaving rank above the vulgar, and below nobility.\u201d Ng continues, \u201cThere are associations with fashion in Gainsborough\u2019s world that have, in a sense, been lost to us. Fashion was a much broader concept that had many more human-life implications.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the fall of 2023, the Frick Collection in New York staged a beguilingly beautiful show of Barkley…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":288241,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[437,146,85,46,108255,9157,5101],"class_list":["post-288240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-arts","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-storytypereporting-story","tag-textabovecenterfullbleed","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288240\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/288241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}