Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture
Auteur(s) : Aimee Ng
Exhibition at the Frick Collection, New York, 12 February – 25 May 2025
The English painter Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788), whose importance was comparable to that of the society artist John Singer Sargent, produced hundreds of portraits, becoming one of the leaders of the fledgling British school of artists. From dukes and duchesses to Ignatius Sancho, a former slave, Gainsborough captured the essence of his contemporaries at a time when portraiture was described as ‘a means by which artists and their subjects could reinforce, resist, or break the rules of the social order.’
This exhibition catalogue focuses on the rich interactions between portraiture and fashion in Gainsborough's art, seeking to understand how and why Gainsborough and his models chose the attire in which they would be immortalised in paint. It analyses how fashion was understood in the painter's time, how the artist sometimes revisited a portrait to update a style, and helps to decipher, several centuries after a work was created, the documentation on the model and the clothing.
