At 30, Thomas Gainsborough had developed a modest provincial career producing portraits of charmingly awkward families posed amid the velvety fields of Suffolk. Then, in 1759, he moved to Bath, and there he encountered three transformative influences. The first was cosmopolitan society, which flocked to the spa town in search of longevity (and wound up achieving immortality at Gainsborough’s hands). Then there were the gentry’s art collections, especially the work of Anthony van Dyck and — perhaps most important — their fashion sense, which turned him on to the expressive power of clothing.
Within a few years, he became a major purveyor of likenesses to the upper crust. The full-length portraits from that first period are grand, theatrical and piercing, with stunningly vivid faces floating above cascades of silk and lace. In the 1770s, he moved to London and rose to the peak of 18th century portraiture, enjoying the patronage of George III. Over time, his style grew looser, bolder and freer, his monumental canvases imbued with atmosphere and feeling.
He twice painted the teenaged soprano Elizabeth Linley, famous for both her voice and her beauty. But by the 1780s, she had become the melancholy Mrs Sheridan, and we see her sitting amid a glowering countryside in the failing light, as if she had emanated from the landscape. Her dress harmonises with the autumn foliage. Trees bend and loop to protect her. The wind whips up her diaphanous shawl to match clouds scudding across the sky.
Gainsborough churned out hundreds of portraits, mostly of sitters he didn’t care for. He reserved a special disdain for aristocrats. “They think (and so may you for a while) that they reward your merit by their company and notice,” he remarked, “but I know that they have only one part worth looking at, and that is their purse.”
The Frick’s fabulous jewel box of a show — the first New York exhibition of Gainsborough’s portraits — gives us the painter at his humane best, largely by steering clear of the indifferently painted nobility. Curator Aimee Ng gravitates, as he did, to the margins: musicians and magicians, actors and dogs, eccentric inventors, women of flexible virtue, and, of course, close friends and family. It’s ironic that this gathering of special minds and talents should focus on what they wore, but then so did he.
Ng uses fashion as an interpretive lens, aiming it at a debate between the era’s two arch-rivals. Gainsborough decreed that portrait subjects should be costumed in contemporary clothing, and he willingly accepted the trade-off — the “misfortune”, he called it — that such looks would quickly go out of style. (Although in homage to his beloved Van Dyck, he sometimes reached back to the 17th century.) Joshua Reynolds, on the other hand, insisted on decking sitters out in togas and flimsy negligees that promoted art’s aspiration to timelessness. (He did, however, make concessions to modern hairstyles.)
Gainsborough had fashion in his bones. His cousin was a London tailor, two sisters were milliners, and in London he lived on Pall Mall, at the heart of the high-end garment district. He believed that style was substance, an intrinsic component of each person’s self. He also understood the relationship between dress and class and took advantage of its mutability. In the 18th century as in the 21st, it could be mortifying to see a picture of oneself sporting a misguided fashion choice from 20 years before. He solved that problem by offering his clients an update service, painting in the trappings of titles conferred after the sitting, adding a set of children to the image of a woman who had died when they were small, or adjusting an outfit to make an old portrait look fresh.
The Frick displays two very different versions of Grace Dalrymple Elliott, an exceedingly tall “demirep” (demimondaine) whose towering hairstyle added an extra foot to her height. Married at 17, she rapidly gained a reputation for dalliances with prominent men. Gainsborough arranged her in profile, wearing a shimmering yellow gown that combined Van Dyck-era style with 18th-century masquerade. A slim ribbon rings her neck and dangles tantalisingly down towards her decolletage. Her hands draw her dress self-protectively around her.
When the painting was shown at the Royal Academy in 1778, critics raved about Elliott’s natural beauty and flamboyant gown, heightened by Gainsborough’s scrumptious colours. That combination even persuaded them to reserve judgment about her outrageous sex life. They were less kind four years later, when Gainsborough presented her again, this time in the form of a painted bust with a discomfitingly direct gaze.
“A wanton countenance; and such hair; good God!” the London Courant yawped.
It’s not clear what triggered the censure, but Ng puts it down to her unambiguously modern, and overtly sexualised, attire. Her naked neck and shoulders are trimmed with splashes of lace that barely cover her breasts. It was one thing to camouflage a woman’s promiscuity in archaic cascades of golden silk; it’s another to flaunt it with an up-to-the-minute, confidently low-cut look.
Ng spotlights the portraits of people (and dogs) whom Gainsborough really liked. Reassuringly, one of them was his wife Margaret, whom he painted often and who appears here in a ravishing 1778 portrait, wearing a black mantle and an expression of genuine tenderness.
He was adept at conveying intelligence and warmth in subtle ways, matching physical clues to personality traits. There’s John Joseph Merlin, for instance, the genial eccentric who invented in-line skates and designed a three-wheeled, self-propelled wheelchair for gout sufferers. (He also created Merlin’s Mechanical Museum, and packed it with clocks, automatons and his patented keyboard instruments.) Gainsborough shapes his generous red lips into a tiny smile, sharpens his grey-eyed gaze, and arrays him in a fur-lined scarlet waistcoat.
An even more sympathetic aura emanates from the composer and viola da gamba player Carl Friedrich Abel. Gainsborough played the same instrument — possibly with more enthusiasm than talent — and he found a way to translate music’s dynamism into paint. Abel sits on a chair and twists towards a desk, his two skills linked to different extremities of his body. The viola da gamba leans against his left thigh (in Italian, gamba means leg); his right hand puts quill to score. Gainsborough concentrates all his skill on his friend, who looks back at him with a companionable smile. The draughtsmanly precision of the face, the explosive and spontaneous strokes of the waistcoat, the broad swath of green drapery rising as a backdrop, the serenity of the white dog dozing comfortably under the table — all conspire to create a portrait of closeness.
Abel died in 1787 before Gainsborough could present him with the gift of a self-portrait — the one he wanted to be remembered by. In that final self-examination, the artist looks out on the world with raised eyebrow and sceptical side-eye, as if he could see the future and did not approve. And yet fashion has a different take. Beneath his chin, a lace collar bursts into an effusive froth. At his death a year later, he left instructions that no posthumous images of him be made — “no plaster cast, model, or likeness whatever” — aside from a reproduction of this lone, definitive portrait in which the man’s cravat expresses all the optimistic energy that his face denies.
To May 25, frick.org
Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning