The Brooklyn Rail

If the Georgian era painter Thomas Gainsborough had been an English Football club his ascent through the ranks of his profession would be commensurate to that of recent phenomenon Wrexham AFC, which has gone from the National League to the Championship in a record three seasons. Gainsborough, born in the minor market town of Sudbury, Suffolk, in 1727, trained in London in his teens, set up practice back in Sudbury in 1749, moved to the larger Ipswich in Suffolk in 1752 and to the teeming society resort town of Bath in Somerset in 1759, was fully promoted to London in 1774, the equivalent of soccer’s pinnacular Premier League. In 1781, he began to paint royal portraits, commensurate to receiving the FA Cup trophy from Prince William at Wembley. A century after his death in 1788, his works were then eagerly collected by men of Gilded Age America, ensuring his entry in the art historical hall of fame. Sporting metaphors aside, Gainsborough’s geographically peripatetic but remarkably rocket-like career arc is celebrated at the Frick in a concentrated show of twenty-five portraits that resolutely presents him as a preeminent and savvy noter of fashion in the form of threads and heads. Compellingly curated by Aimee Ng and installed in the Frick’s intimate-by-design special exhibition galleries on entirely appropriate Benjamin Moore “Hidden Falls” green walls, it traces the artist’s early small-town precision as it evolved into the metropolitan bravura brushwork of his maturity through his interest in self-fashioning society.

Three early works in gallery one introduce us to Gainsborough’s brand of carefully drawn Rococo-styled figures against earthy backdrops marked by solid British oaks and changeable skies. Cabinet-sized pictures, working in the native conversation piece tradition, they are as solemn as Italian Renaissance Sacra Conversazione (sacred conversations) altarpieces (absent the Holy Family), and bent on likenesses and eye contact with the viewer. The highlight is the panoramic Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (ca. 1750) from London’s National Gallery. The unstressed couple is at left: Robert stands armed and in hunting attire with legs crossed while Frances sits on a wrought iron green rustic bench, dainty yet “sensible” pink satin mules and all. To the right spread their immaculately maintained possessions, emptied of human laboring presence if not endeavor, with bundled corn and a distant sheepfold, under perfectly billowing clouds. The second gallery covers Gainsborough’s middle period and features the full-length Mary, Countess Howe (1763–64) from Kenwood House in Hampstead. She is paused while off on a wild walk in her pink satin nightgown and Leghorn straw hat; a rustic wood-slat fence runs behind her on both sides. There is not a parterre garden in sight: this is English landscape scenery. Thistles at left overlap the forward swishing part of her dress—perhaps catching it, a threatening detail. It is wonderfully matter of fact in her visage and pose and serves as evidence of the market’s ability to support such large pictures in Bath from 1759. Another highlight of this room is the half-length of Mary, Duchess of Montagu (ca. 1768), a moving depiction of resilience in old age, lent by the Duke of Buccleuch.

The final room, however, is the show-stopper, with a parade of characters from Gainsborough’s London heyday, when he was a founding member of the Royal Academy of Arts, when he challenged Joshua Reynolds for market supremacy, and when he aesthetically blew that less daring rival out of the water in developing his brand. Here Gainsborough channeled his hero Anthony van Dyck in dress and drama, and ambling a few rooms away to the permanent collection to see the latter’s superb Lady Anne Carey, Later Viscountess Claneboye and Countess of Clanbrassil (ca. 1636) with its economic brushstrokes and brilliantly broad touch in the lower section will be instructive. But what Gainsborough also took from the Flemish Baroque master was the ability to show elements in motion to give a sense of vivacity and the temporal. Just look at the ravishing portrait of Mrs. Sheridan (ca. 1783–87) from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, with its diaphanous and breeze-inflected scarf, the flutter of her left oversleeve flapping out behind her, the implication of her turning motion in the pose. So very different from the frozen postures of Reynolds’s female victims, all those figures seemingly chipped and wrested off of a sculpted frieze, such as the ashen-faced Selina, Lady Skipwith (1787) and stiff and apprehensive Elizabeth, Lady Taylor (ca. 1780) in the nearby Library.

Gainsborough’s men fascinate, if only because unlike works such as Reynolds’s General John Burgoyne (ca. 1766)—also in the Library, a half-length stiff Apollo for eternity—his Carl Friedrich Abel, James Christie, and Captain Augustus John Hervey lean back or forward into their roles, which gives them a sense of purpose and liveliness and makes up for the relative formality and weight of their costume compared to the range of materials and colors available to female sitters. By contrast, we can and must delight in the ribbons of deftly applied paint in the grand collar of Mrs. Fitzherbert (ca. 1784), a late, unfinished bust-length portrait of the Prince of Wales’s secret bride. The freedom of brushstrokes is only rivaled by Jean-Honoré Fragonard in the period.

The highlight of the meticulously researched and finely argued catalogue is Ng’s lovely essay on “Fashion, Portraits, and Time,” a meditation on Gainsborough’s methods covering his reworking of pictures to suit aging sitters, choice of historical clothing, sense of his own mortality, and the employment of portraiture as preservation of face and position—not the least his own: “the painter marshalling the past to establish himself as the forefront of an emerging British school of art” (p. 72). That proclivity towards portraiture, in part the product of Henry VIII’s ditching Rome and the consequent dearth of religious commissions for painters in Britain, and the nation’s long struggle to produce historical works on par with those of the French school, would see Gainsborough’s inheritance in two of the greatest and grandest portraitists of the next century—John Everett Millais and John Singer Sargent. But that is a story for another time.

Standing in the third and final room of this jewel of a show you might ask yourself which of these Augustan age worthies, so removed from reality and elevated in station, you might want to hang out with. My answer is Frances Duncombe, whose full-length of about 1776 now lives at the Frick along with nine other works by Gainsborough. She wears her “pearl-laden electric-blue” (p. 72) Van Dyck costume with practiced ease for one of age twenty, and turns to her right, opening her mouth slightly, forming Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s famed speaking likeness. She seems game for anything. She must have later charmed Beethoven and his circle in Bonn, where she lived until the early 1790s. But of course Gainsborough has given her an allure that was beyond fashion and social status, one that was priceless even at London market rates, and her magnetism and eternal beauty, enhanced by the fragment of a Tuscan folly in the left background, replete with classical goddess in a niche, made Mr. Frick an offer could not refuse when he bought the work in 1911, in quest of something suitably ageless and close to priceless. The picture leaps across time from Van Dyck’s Baroque to Duncombe’s Age of Revolution, to Frick’s Gilded Age, and to our own fractious moment: such works continue to shine today in the classless down-market Rococo (Faux-coco?) of Donald Trump. An encapsulation of Gainsborough’s seemingly effortless atemporal gift, worthy of all the trophies.