In the fall of 2023, the Frick Collection in New York staged a beguilingly beautiful show of Barkley L. Hendricks portraits surrounded by the Old Master paintings that so inspired him. This decidedly contemporary exhibition was especially fitting for the museum’s temporary space, dubbed Frick Madison, at the Brutalist Breuer Building, now occupied by Sotheby’s.
Two and a half years (and one grand homecoming) later, the Frick is going back to its roots by spotlighting one of the 18th-century portraitists that enchanted both Hendricks and the museum’s founder, Henry Clay Frick: Thomas Gainsborough. From February 12 through May 11, 2026, the Frick presents “Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture” in its recently inaugurated Ronald S. Lauder Exhibition Galleries.
For fans of the Frick, which houses more than 10 works by Gainsborough, it may come as a surprise that this exhibition marks the museum’s first on the English artist—not to mention New York’s first devoted to his portraiture. Gainsborough’s wispy yet regal figures have long been fixtures in great British country houses, and during the Gilded Age, American collectors clamored to acquire them to imbue their homes with a sense of history and prestige.
Attitudes toward British portraiture, especially in this country, have changed considerably over the years according to Aimee Ng, the Frick’s Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator. “An 18th-century British painting has, in some ways, come to be seen—at least in this country, and by certain generations—as dusty old pictures of dusty rich people benefiting from colonization and enslaved labor,” Ng told audiences at the exhibition’s press preview on February 10. “While this is an indisputable part of this history, and an important part, there are so many human stories to tell about Gainsborough’s world and the crucial place and power of portraits in it.”
In conceiving the show over the last decade, Ng tells Vogue that her goal was to “reintroduce the artist in a way that acknowledges the complexity of the social world he and his sitters lived in and the role of portraits in that social world.” Portraiture was the most popular form of painting in 18th-century Britain, and it hinged on fashion—though people had a somewhat different understanding of the word then. “The more I dug into concepts of fashion in the 18th century, and Georgian Britain in particular, I was amazed at how fashion was so different conceptually than it is today. It had specific and explicit associations with social class,” says the curator, noting that in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) a “fashionable” person was defined as “having rank above the vulgar, and below nobility.” Ng continues, “There are associations with fashion in Gainsborough’s world that have, in a sense, been lost to us. Fashion was a much broader concept that had many more human-life implications.”