‘Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture’ Brings the Glamor of High Style to the Frick Mansion

“Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture,” a new show at the Frick Collection, is the perfect antidote to a winter spent smothered in puffer jackets and swaddled in scarves. Here is the apparel of taste, status, and wealth of 18th century England as seen through the eyes and paintbrush of a painter who captured the age. Walking into the exhibition, though, can feel like fetching up to an impossibly chic party — and being hopelessly underdressed.“The Fashion of Portraiture” is the first show at New York devoted to the artist’s portraits. It is yet another feather in the cap of a painter born in 1727 at rural Suffolk who went on to found the Royal Academy and rise so high that he became a favored painter of George III and the House of Hanover. Gainsborough’s portraits are dignified but hardly ponderous. He worked quickly with a light palette and easy brushstrokes. He closely studied Van Eyck.Gainsborough’s career took off at Bath, where he gained his groove painting portraits of the smart set. “Fashion” in Gainsborough’s time — at least according to Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, from 1775 — referred to a stratum below the nobility but above the “vulgar.” Gainsborough’s family was involved — unsuccessfully— in the fabric and drapery business, so it comes as little surprise that he developed a virtuosity for painting folds, sheen, and texture.Gainsborough engaged in a consequential feud with the Royal Academy’s president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, over how to paint portraits. Reynolds, a dean of 18th century art, insisted that his subjects be rendered in the garb of ancient Greece and Rome. Gainsborough, though, wanted the contemporary to look au courant. The result is that his sitters appear a la mode even centuries later. He would sometimes update his portraits as fashion shifted.‘Thomas Gainsborough,’ by Thomas Gainsborough. 1787. Oil on canvas. Prudence Cuming Associates Limited for Royal Academy of ArtThe Frick notes that Gainsborough “attended to every swath of satin and knot of lace,” but his artistry was hardly limited to people and fabric. “Mr. and Mrs. Andrews,” on display here, is one of his most famous paintings. It is sometimes called a “triple portrait” for its depiction of not only the couple but also their land, which plays an almost starring role — as if it is a landscape that has allowed space for its sitters. The human, though, takes center stage in “Mary, Countess Howe,” Gainsborough’s first full-length female portrait. It is monumental and sophisticated. The lace is painted as layered transparency, and strings of pearl signal cascading wealth. The pink of her dress pops. In “Margaret Gainsborough” the painter captures his wife as distinguished but hardly stiff. The intimacy and sympathy with which Margaret is painted comes after three decades of marriage.“Grace Dalrymple Elliot” faces the viewer directly, her cheeks enticingly rouged. Her neckline daringly follows the contours of her breast, and a dangling black ribbon contrasts with pale skin. When this portrait was first exhibited in 1782, London gossip columnists were abuzz. Elliott had just given birth, and the tongue waggers reckoned that the father was the Prince of Wales, the future George IV. The portrait’s sexiness hardly staunched rumors. Gainsborough’s entanglement with the Georgian elite and their peccadillos is confirmed in “Mrs. Fitzherbert,” a portrait of another lover of the Prince of Wales, who was at the time already involved with Elliott. Fitzherbert and the prince secretly married, with the bride six years older than her husband. The union, eventually deemed invalid, was a scandal due to its unsanctioned nature and Fitzherbert’s Catholic faith. The painting is intimate and inviting. The year before Gainsborough died, in 1787, he painted his last self-portrait. There is no sign of the artist’s vocation or the painter’s studio. Gainsborough figures himself as a gentleman. His gaze, though, is sidelong and wary, catching something off canvas. Gainsborough, a great painter of the elite and the son of a bankrupt father, never lost his skepticism for the trappings of wealth. He called his “gentlemen” clients as only good for their “purse.” Gainsborough, unlike some of his contemporaries, never took a Grand Tour to meet the Old Masters in situ. He was English through and through. His posthumous reputation rose in the middle of the 19th century when Lionel de Rothschild developed a passion for his work. Gainsborough was reputed to have been as gifted a letter writer as he was a painter. His daughter Peggy reported that his last words on his death bed were “Van Eyck.”

‘Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture’ Brings the Glamor of High Style to the Frick Mansion

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