Thomas Gainsborough means one thing in Britain. He means another in America
Gilded Age industrialists were mad for the quintessentially English artist. A new exhibition at The Frick in New York City, focused on fashion in his portraiture, sets the stage for a revival.
‘Bye bye, Blue Boy,’ at least one alliterative art lover must have said — one imagines through tears — while staring up at the iconic Thomas Gainsborough painting when it was hung in London’s National Gallery in January 1922. The portrait of an unknown youth dressed in blue finery, owned by the Duke of Westminster and ensconced in Britain's cultural heritage, had been bought — by an American. Prior to being shipped to California, it was displayed publicly so Britons could bid farewell. Some 90,000 did so over three weeks.
'The Blue Boy' was exhibited in London in 2022 — the first time it has been seen in the UK for a century.
The purchase of The Blue Boy, by railroad magnate Henry E. Huntington, was, in today’s terms, ‘a flex’. It signalled that things were going well enough in the former colonies across the Atlantic that the nation’s wealthy could pay the British prices they couldn’t refuse for their own treasures. Huntington paid 728,000 of those days’ dollars for The Blue Boy, making it the most expensive painting in the world.
Until then, the American attitude toward Gainsborough (1727–88), who in Britain was the most sought-after society portraitist of his day, might best be described as indifferent. As for contemporaneous interest, recall that America’s birth year is 1776, and you’ll grant the business of founding a nation to have been a reasonable distraction. Indeed, through most of the century that followed, America was more preoccupied with finding its footing than it was with overseas oil paintings; during the Civil War, it was Gettysburg, not Gainsborough.
That all changed with the Gilded Age and the turn of the 20th century, when America’s newly wealthy industrialists began acquiring Georgian paintings as a means of connecting to their British past. The Huntingtons on the West Coast and the Vanderbilts and Fricks on the East homed in on Gainsborough in particular. Even across the Midwest, in places like St. Louis and Kansas City, collectors clamoured for his portraits to hang in their homes.
Now, a century later, the artist is back in the spotlight in the USA with Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture, on view through May 25 at The Frick Collection in New York City (above). While Henry Clay Frick bought eight Gainsborough works in his lifetime, and the museum acquired others after his death, the exhibition is the first devoted to the artist at The Frick, and in New York more broadly, it’s the first of his portraiture, ever. Bringing together The Frick’s holdings as well as loans from collections across North America and the UK, the show explores the fashions depicted in Gainsborough’s portraits — all that brocade and silk and lace, rendered in the artist’s webby, illusionistic brushwork — as well as fashions around portraiture itself (the act of having a portrait made, and how).
The 25-work transatlantic grouping is the initiative of Aimee Ng. The Frick chief curator began working on it a decade ago, and with the museum’s highly publicised renovation complete and the place reopened, the show is on.
The exhibition is largely the brainchild of Aimee Ng — pictured here at a Country Life event in 2025.
I asked Aimee about the Gilded Age enthusiasm for Gainsborough. ‘Suddenly, it's within the realm of possibility for these American collectors to get these treasured objects across the Atlantic’, she says. ‘The dust has settled, and America figures out, “Okay — we're okay — and there is a more historic and stately past to celebrate”. Americans see that their British origin is something they actually do want to aspire to recreate in some way.’
Across two rooms, The Fashion of Portraiture traces the arc of Gainsborough’s career, from the Suffolk native’s time working in the countryside, to his move to fashionable Bath and ultimately to London. Starting with a few of his early ‘conversation pieces’ — group portraits of small-scale figures, including the unforgettable Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (about 1750) — it moves through the full-length and bust portraits he made at his peak. For the era’s ‘people of fashion’ — a term connoting a rank below nobility, but above ‘the vulgar’ — what one wore in their portrait was as important as who painted it, or its execution. While Gainsborough sometimes depicted his sitters in period ‘Van Dyck dress’, he generally insisted on contemporary fashion, considering it integral to the likeness. He’d even alter a portrait years after he made it, painting over whatever clothes were originally shown to update the sitter’s look.
Speaking to the difference between Gainsborough’s place in Britain and in America, Aimee says that in negotiating loans from American collections, she was typically borrowing from a museum, where the work is an object with an inventory number. In the UK, she was sometimes asking to borrow a family portrait hung in a stately home, as was the case in petitioning the Duke of Norfolk’s estate for Bernard Howard, 12th Duke of Norfolk (1788).
With next year the 300th anniversary of Gainsborough’s birth, Aimee was relieved to pull off The Fashion of Portraiture ahead of the celebratory exhibitions being planned in the UK. ‘It's like a fistfight out there right now for Gainsboroughs,’ she says, ‘so I’m very happy to be clear of that.’
