Within the fall of 2023, the Frick Assortment in New York staged a beguilingly lovely present of Barkley L. Hendricks portraits surrounded by the Previous Grasp work that so impressed him. This decidedly modern exhibition was particularly becoming for the museum’s non permanent house, dubbed Frick Madison, on the Brutalist Breuer Constructing, now occupied by Sotheby’s.
Two and a half years (and one grand homecoming) later, the Frick goes again to its roots by spotlighting one of many 18th-century portraitists that enchanted each Hendricks and the museum’s founder, Henry Clay Frick: Thomas Gainsborough. From February 12 by way of Might 11, 2026, the Frick presents “Gainsborough: The Vogue of Portraiture” in its not too long ago inaugurated Ronald S. Lauder Exhibition Galleries.
For followers of the Frick, which homes greater than 10 works by Gainsborough, it might come as a shock that this exhibition marks the museum’s first on the English artist—to not point out New York’s first dedicated to his portraiture. Gainsborough’s wispy but regal figures have lengthy been fixtures in nice British nation homes, and in the course of the Gilded Age, American collectors clamored to amass them to imbue their properties with a way of historical past and status.
Attitudes towards British portraiture, particularly on this nation, have modified significantly over time in line with Aimee Ng, the Frick’s Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator. “An 18th-century British portray has, in some methods, come to be seen—a minimum of on this nation, and by sure generations—as dusty previous photos of dusty wealthy individuals benefiting from colonization and enslaved labor,” Ng advised audiences on the exhibition’s press preview on February 10. “Whereas that is an indeniable a part of this historical past, and an vital half, there are such a lot of human tales to inform about Gainsborough’s world and the essential place and energy of portraits in it.”
In conceiving the present during the last decade, Ng tells Vogue that her purpose was to “reintroduce the artist in a manner that acknowledges the complexity of the social world he and his sitters lived in and the function of portraits in that social world.” Portraiture was the preferred type of portray in 18th-century Britain, and it hinged on style—although individuals had a considerably completely different understanding of the phrase then. “The extra I dug into ideas of style within the 18th century, and Georgian Britain particularly, I used to be amazed at how style was so completely different conceptually than it’s right this moment. It had particular and express associations with social class,” says the curator, noting that in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) a “modern” individual was outlined as “having rank above the vulgar, and beneath the Aristocracy.” Ng continues, “There are associations with style in Gainsborough’s world which have, in a way, been misplaced to us. Vogue was a much wider idea that had many extra human-life implications.”
