Gainsborough Portraits in New York at the Frick
By • February 26, 2026 0 435
Perfectly in tune with the spacious elegance of the expanded and modernized Frick Collection is “Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture,” an exhibition of 25 portraits — including one of a Pomeranian dog and puppy — on view through Memorial Day, May 25.
Unlike “Fashioned by Sargent,” presented at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in 2023, the Frick exhibition — said to be the first New York museum show of Gainsborough portraits, organized by Chief Curator Aimee Ng — displays no period gowns or accessories. While Edwardian portraitist John Singer Sargent painted sitters in clothing they owned (with various interventions), his Georgian predecessor often “dressed” his in garments that were at least partly imaginary.
You might say that Gainsborough’s approach was made of whole cloth. Born in 1727, the youngest son of a fabric merchant, he excelled at representing the texture and drape of silk, satin and lace.
To keep up with demand, his classically minded rival Joshua Reynolds relied on specialist assistants. According to the London-based Wallace Collection’s Reynolds Research Project: “We know from his sitter books that the clothing of his clientele was routinely shipped out, along with their portraits, to drapery painters.”
“Mary, Countess Howe” of 1763-64 from Kenwood House.
Trained in London from age 13, Gainsborough married and returned to his hometown of Sudbury, a Suffolk town on the border of Essex, northeast of London, in his early 20s. There, around 1750, he painted “Mr. and Mrs. Andrews”; lent by Britain’s National Gallery of Art, it opens the Frick exhibition.
Companionably paired in front of an old oak, Robert and Frances Andrews occupy the left half of this relatively modest and somewhat curious horizontal masterpiece. Landowner Robert, like Gainsborough, attended Sudbury Grammar School, but went on to Oxford. The painting’s right half is a serene landscape that stretches from tight sheaves of wheat in the foreground to meadows where tiny sheep graze, woods and distant hills.
With its equal attention to the countryside, “Mr. and Mrs. Andrews” has been called a triple portrait (a quadruple portrait, if you count the hound), signaling the artist’s divided nature: though he made his living from society portraits, Gainsborough preferred to paint country scenes, famously writing: “I’m sick of Portraits and wish very much to take my Viol da Gam and walk off to some sweet Village where I can paint Landskips.”
That quote comes from a letter to a friend written in 1768 in Bath, the spa town in Somerset, about 100 miles west of London, to which the affluent, prominent and court-connected flocked during the “season” of balls, plays and concerts.
After a few years in Ipswich, a Suffolk port town, Gainsborough relocated to Bath in 1759, still tied to his family’s apron strings. The exhibition text notes: “Gainsborough’s picture room, or showroom, was adjacent to his sister Mary’s millinery shop, with his painting room, or studio, upstairs.”
In Bath, captivated by the work of Anthony van Dyck, the Rubens protégé who become court painter to Charles I in 1632, Gainsborough adopted the Baroque “grand manner” without giving up his rococo lightness of touch.
Though it didn’t make the cross-country trip from the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, “The Blue Boy” is a classic example of this van Dyck-inspired style, which the elite in Bath found irresistible. Painted around 1770, the subject — possibly Gainsborough’s nephew, who gazes out from a study-like portrait in the Frick exhibition — is dressed in a suit from the prior century,
Directly opposite the entrance, on the second gallery’s far wall, is one of the greatest of the nine full-length portraits in the exhibition: “Mary, Countess Howe” of 1763-64 from Kenwood House, the estate-turned-museum on London’s Hampstead Heath. Though painted in Gainsborough’s studio, the young countess is shown out of doors in a Leghorn hat, with pink and gray clouds setting off her splendid pink gown, seen through the sheer apron she lifts.
Also in the second gallery, from the later 1760s, are dignified portraits of the elderly-appearing (she was in her 50s) Mary, Duchess of Montagu, and Ignatius Sancho, a servant in the Montagu household who became a composer and an abolitionist. The latter is Gainsborough’s only portrait of a Black person.
Gainsborough’s 1778 portrait of auction-house founder James Christie, from the Getty.
The largest of the three galleries, all with forest green walls, stunningly displays 15 portraits, most from after 1774, when Gainsborough left Bath for London. Shown in white wig and stockings at his desk (under which a Pomeranian rests), his instrument leaning at right, is German composer Carl Friedrich Abel, Gainsborough’s viola da gamba teacher, a work on loan from the Huntington. Hung next to the full-length portrait, also dating to around 1777, is “Pomeranian and Puppy” from Tate Britain.
Three more exceptional full-lengths: “The Hon. Frances Duncombe,” its statuesque sitter dressed in Gainsborough blue, painted around 1776, from the Frick; “Mrs. Sheridan” of the 1780s, in which the (pensive? yearning?) figure’s clothing and hair seem to flutter in the wind, from our own National Gallery; and, in Dutch Master black, “Bernard Howard, Later 12th Duke of Norfolk” of 1788, lent by “His Grace, the Duke of Norfolk, Arundel Castle, Sussex,” on public view for the first time.
Other works in that gallery depict the painter’s wife, Margaret; auction-house founder James Christie (with a Gainsborough-esque landscape); and clock- and musical instrument-maker John Joseph Merlin, shown holding his tiny scale for gold coins. In the latter’s honor, the Frick’s new café, Westmoreland, is offering a specialty cocktail, Merlin’s Martini.
Across the Garden Court, in the dark-paneled Library Gallery, is a newly promised gift: “Mrs. Alexander Champion,” which Gainsborough painted in 1767, updating the sitter’s clothing and hair style at her request around 1775.
The museum is linking the plantings in its Fifth Avenue Garden to the exhibition and presenting a series of related public programs, including a conversation between Ng and designer Isaac Mizrahi (March 4), a seminar on the music of Ignatius Sancho (April 19) and a talk by Surveyor of The King’s Pictures Anna Reynolds (April 29).
Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture
Through May 25
The Frick Collection, 1 E. 70th St., Manhattan
10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. except Tuesday
Advance timed tickets required
