The Tamesis
In the fall of 2023, the Frick Collection in New York presents a stunning exhibition of Barkley L. Hendricks portraits, surrounded by Old Master paintings that inspired him. This decidedly contemporary exhibition is particularly suited to the museum’s temporary space, called the Frick Madison, located in the Brutalist Breuer Building, now occupied by Sotheby’s.
After two and a half years (and a grand return), the Frick is returning to its roots, focusing on an 18th-century portrait painter who fascinated Hendrix and the museum’s founder, Henry Clay Frick: Thomas Gainsborough. From February 12 to May 11, 2026, the Frick Museum presents “Gainsborough: Fashion in Portrait” in its recently completed Ronald S. Lauder Exhibition Gallery.
For fans of the Frick, which houses more than 10 pieces by Gainsborough, the exhibition may come as a surprise because it is the first time the museum has shown a work by the British artist, let alone the first time in New York devoted to his portraits. Gainsborough’s slender yet regal statues have long been a fixture in England’s great country houses, and during the Gilded Age American collectors rushed to acquire them to inject a sense of history and prestige into their homes.
Attitudes toward British portraiture, especially in this country, have changed a lot over the years, said Aimee Ng, the Peter J. Sharp chief curator at the Frick. “In some ways, an 18th-century British painting is seen – at least in this country, for some generations – as a dusty old picture of the dusty rich benefiting from colonial and slave labor,” Ng told viewers at a Feb. 10 press preview of the exhibition. “While this is an indisputable part of that history and an important one, there are so many human stories to be told about Gainsborough’s world and Britain’s pivotal position and power. There are portraits in it.”
Wu told us that while conceiving the show over the past decade Fashion Her aim was “to reintroduce the artist in a way that acknowledges the complexity of the social world in which the artist and his models lived, and the role of portraiture in that social world.” Portrait was the most popular form of painting in 18th-century Britain, and it depended on fashion – although the word was understood somewhat differently at the time. “The more I researched the concept of fashion in the 18th century, the moreth I was struck by how conceptually different fashion was in the twentieth century, specifically in Georgian England, than it is today. It has a specific and clear connection to social class,” the curator said, noting that in the work of Samuel Johnson dictionary (1755) A “fashionable” person was defined as one whose “status is higher than vulgarity and lower than aristocracy.” Wu continued, “In a sense, the connection to fashion in Gainsborough’s world has been lost for us. Fashion is a much broader concept and has much more impact on human life.”
