A new exhibition at the Frick Collection, "Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture," re-examines the 18th-century English painter's work. It focuses on how his portraits, from early Suffolk "conversation pieces" to later Bath society commissions, used landscape and lavish clothing to visually encode social status, ownership, and belonging.
The exhibition, curated by Aimee Ng, directly confronts modern critiques of such portraits as mere celebrations of colonial-era wealth. It argues that Gainsborough's work was central to a period where "taste" was considered a moral technology, a visual system used to distinguish virtuous refinement from vulgar extravagance. The show makes a case for the complexity of fashion in these paintings as a site of intense social negotiation and self-fashioning for a newly wealthy class.