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The challenge of appreciating art from another culture is that we don’t know the codes, understand the backstories, or share the references that made it so resonant with the original audience. The barrier is often lowered with Old Masters paintings because of the familiar classical and religious references. But when it comes to portraiture, especially from 18th century Georgian England, ordinary or seemingly straightforward images can turn out to be something else entirely. That’s what’s so interesting and refreshing about the Frick Collection’s new show, Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture, which opens Thursday. It may not fully decode the complex social world of Britain’s “first fashion,” but it does give viewers the tools to relate to images that would otherwise seem stuffy and remote.

Let me give you an example. If you go to Huntington Library in San Marino, California—something of a West Coast corollary to the Frick—there’s a dining room encircled with full-length portraits by fashionable 18th century portraitists. Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy, from 1770, is the most famous of these. It depicts a young man in a bright blue suit thought to be Gainsborough’s nephew and successor, Gainsborough Dupont. Looking at this and the other portraits, you might assume that the subjects are dressed as they lived, that Dupont was wearing the 18th century equivalent of a young noble’s best formal clothes—his bar mitzvah suit, if you will.

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The Frick’s show takes great pains to demonstrate the evolution of Gainsborough’s art. He started by setting portraits within landscapes, both because he liked to paint them and because landscapes allowed him to show persons of different classes and social stations in believable settings. That’s how we get the “conversation piece” portraying Peter Darnell Muilman, Charles Crokatt, and William Keable. The first two men had been born into wealthy merchant families in Amsterdam and Charleston, South Carolina, before buying estates in Essex, but the third was a local painter and musician. Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, painted around 1750, shows the pair on a bench. But it’s as much a depiction of their lands as of the couple, who had made their fortune through savvy money lending and the further accumulation of land.

Once Gainsborough had upgraded to London, a new matrix of pictorial problems presented itself. Georgian society had a fair number of figures who lived in a status penumbra, and Gainsborough didn’t shy away from depicting them. Among the portraits in the show are a divorced “woman of pleasure,” a duke who didn’t quite like dressing as one, and even a servant to one of his better patrons, Lady Montague.

The servant, a man named Ignatius Sancho, had been born on a slave ship but hired by the duke partly due to his intelligence. When Gainsborough painted individual portraits of the family, he also painted Sancho—not dressed as a servant, but as the noted composer, writer, and abolitionist he was becoming. It’s a mystery whether the noble portrait Gainsborough produced was a gift from the family to Sancho or a sign of Gainsborough’s respect for the man.

Gainsborough’s artistic choices were radical in more subtle ways, too. The show includes two paintings of Grace Dalrymple Elliott, who was educated in France, married a Scottish doctor 18 years her senior, and later divorced him. Elliott would go on to become the mistress of King George IV, among other men, and spy for the British during the French Revolution, but her divorce relegated her to a social purgatory that required constant finesse. In the first of the exhibition’s Elliott portraits, she appears as if just returned from a walk outdoors, attired in a fanciful yellow dress suggesting a masquerade ball, with a towering hairstyle adding to her striking height. Critics latched on to public gossip about Elliott, but the overall effect of the portrait was to excuse her lapses due to her great beauty. Four years later, Gainsborough would paint a bust-length portrait of Elliott, in the fashion of her own time, with dramatic makeup. By then, though, she had given birth to an illegitimate child of the Prince of Wales, and the likeness did more to upset critics than soothe her reputation.

Thomas Gainsborough, Grace Dalrymple Elliott (1782). Photo: Michael Bodycomb

Finessing his work was a familiar task for Gainsborough. He often had to repaint portraits to add symbols of changing rank, include children, or address the aging of the sitter. The rapidly changing fashions of Georgian England also posed a problem for society portrait painters. Should subjects be depicted in their own clothes, fantasy dress that gave the sitter a more heroic or beguiling look (the Georgian equivalent of filters), or something else entirely? None of Gainsborough’s rivals had an easy solution. But Gainsborough’s facility with painting fabric meant that he often invented clothes for his subjects.

Toward the end of his life, Gainsborough, who had spent a fair amount of time copying the work of Anthony van Dyck, a successful court painter of a century earlier, came upon the idea of depicting men in what the exhibition refers to as “van Dyck dress.” In the center of the main room at the Frick featuring these Gainsboroughs is the artist’s last portrait, a painting of Bernard Howard, who would become the 12th Duke of Norfolk. His predecessor, Charles Howard, was known to indulge in the affectation of dressing below his station in life. But in both their Gainsborough portraits, they are dressed in timeless black outfits that assure the viewer of their august nobility.

That’s all I have for today. I’ll be back tomorrow for a conversation with Anders Kold, curator and head of acquisitions at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Art. Upgrade to the Inner Circle here if you want to join us.

Until then,
M

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