Georgian Gorgeous, Courtesy of Gainsborough and the Frick

Couture with dash and sparkle delivered in New York’s first Gainsborough show.

G ainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture is the new exhibition at the Frick Collection and a beauty. Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) loved his rural landscapes the most but, today, we think of him for his portraits, those lush surfaces painted with the speed of light. Some of the portraits in the show took just a bit more than an hour. New York, America’s fashion capital, hasn’t ever had a Gainsborough portrait show. The Frick, with eight Gainsborough portraits and dozens of portraits by other artists, seems to be the best place for one. The exhibition displays 27 paintings and transports us to Georgian England at its most chic. You can hear the taffeta rustle, eye the silk as it shimmers, and gaze on the soft velvet.

It’s a sumptuous show, roughly chronological but with a keen eye toward putting things where they look best. From childhood, cloth was in Gainsborough’s DNA. His father was a weaver and sold high-end woolen goods in Sudbury in Surrey. Gainsborough showed talent as a child when he decorated shrouds and as a young adult in London worked for William Hogarth and Francis Hayman. He painted as a career first in Sudbury, then in the 1760s in Bath, a spa town, and, after 1774, in London. His studios were always in neighborhoods thick with drapers, milliners, and tailors.

There’s little filler and few outliers — I wrote “little” and “few,” not “no” and “no.” It’s an ensemble cast. Still, for dash and sparkle, I’d say The Honorable Frances Duncombe, one of the Frick’s portraits, is an icon, and we think it was painted in 1776 so, like America, it’s 250 years old. Traitors crossing the Delaware were far from Frances’s mind, though. It’s toward the end of the show but the space is small — too small — so it doesn’t matter.

Frances’s portrait is both an early Gainsborough London portrait and among his first truly Grand Manner portraits. She wears delectable fashion inspired by van Dyck’s portraits, acres of satin adorned with hundreds of cultured pearls and a standing dog-tooth collar. It is and isn’t historicist. Gainsborough was, on the one hand, well-tuned to contemporary fashion but, on the other, keen to evoke in his work aristocratic portraiture of the past. In that niche, van Dyck had no peer, and in the 1770s the van Dyck look was back in style for balls. Elegant, graceful, in an Arcadian setting as were dozens of van Dyck’s English portraits, both royal and aristocratic, Frances also evokes respectable English heritage before civil war and the advent of the thick, square-headed, German Hanovers. As a young artist, Gainsborough copied van Dyck — his copy of Lords John and Bernard Stuart, after Anthony van Dyck from 1765 is in the show, next to Frances — and, in his career painted about 30 subjects dressed to quote van Dyck. The most famous is The Blue Boy from 1770.

Mr. and Mrs. Andrews from around 1750 is in the exhibition, in the first gallery with two or three other Gainsborough conversation pieces. The conversation piece, popular in Rococo and Georgian England, is a group portrait, in a parlor or a landscape, showing subjects chatting or looking casual. Art historians tend to think of it as radical since it depicts the young couple, rich and just married, sharing the picture with their land so it’s a portrait and a landscape, the farmed land, the source of their wealth, effectively a third subject. It makes the term “landed gentry” explicit and identifies the Andrewses as a new caste, substantial landowners, gentlemen and gentle lady farmers, not aristocrats. Of course, these art historians say the picture celebrates the patriarchy and capitalism, which the Frick seems to buy. This is absurd.

Mister’s dress, Debrett’s suggests, would have been proper attire for hunting, brown and green, long jacket (though the jacket today might be waxed), and fitted breeches. His shoes are too la di da, but he’s not hunting in the woods for bear to feed his family. Tricorn hats were ubiquitous for casual wear, able to show off wigs but also supple enough to be tucked under the arm. His is braided for extra panache. His jacket’s disheveled, which is very English.

She’s dressed bergère-style, a French look drawn from shepherdesses, casual, backless pink satin shoes, and a straw hat called a leghorn, the English version of the Livorno in Italy, then made from Tuscan wheat, good for shade. It evokes peasant wear in a highbrow way. The picture’s very site-specific. It’s in Sudbury in Suffolk, shows the Andrewses’ land down to the tree, still standing, and the two churches in the background, still in business.

I don’t think of the English as a particularly good-looking race of people. The Andrewses are pasty and ever so angular, both pinched, weak-chinned, and bug-eyed as the English are more often than not. Like other early Gainsborough portraits, which tended to depict locals, there’s a touch of caricature here, a cartoon quality, stiff dolls.

Yes, it’s a triple portrait and suggests a new slice in hierarchal England. It’s a particular celebration, too, since the Andrewses were, before they became husband and wife, neighbors. In 1750, Mrs. Andrews inherited her family’s land, uniting their source of wealth and their home with that of Mr. Andrews. And I would suggest it’s a quadruple portrait. Gainsborough was from Sudbury, too. He and Mr. Andrews were the same age and went to school together. The Gainsborough family plot is in the churchyard whose tower we can see between two distant trees, near the center of the portrait. Gainsborough, from a family in trade and himself a working painter, didn’t have the status of the Andrews family but, at least in school, they were peers, and Gainsborough’s wife, Margaret, whom he married in 1746, was the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Beaufort, and this was no secret. Gainsborough might have loved shoehorning himself in the picture. The Andrews might have been in on the joke.

Mary, Countess Howe from 1763–1764 is the catalogue’s cover image and the lead image for the Frick’s publicity. She’s in the next gallery. It’s a Bath portrait, Rococo pink, with the subject wearing her bergère and leghorn as does Mrs. Andrews, but the countess has triple lace detachable sleeves, black wristbands contrasting with her pale skin, and a diaphanous fichu, or kerchief, veiling her chest. Wearing five strings of pearls, she makes Mrs. Andrews look like Auntie Em from Kansas. Gainsborough portrays her in mid-step, translucent layers revealed and swishes whispering in the summer breeze.

The portraits in this gallery are arranged with Countess Howe as the central draw but pairs in conversation across the gallery. To the left of Countess Howe, for example, is Mrs. Fitzherbert from 1784, a late Gainsborough. She’s among the most notorious women in a century packed with them. In 1782, Maria Smythe, twice widowed, a Roman Catholic, and only the granddaughter of a baronet, secretly married the Prince of Wales, the future George IV. The scandal gripped press, George III, not yet demented, Queen Charlotte, and respectable people far and wide. Under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772 the marriage was invalid — it was Maria’s faith that did her in — but she and George continued to socialize after he married — disastrously — Caroline of Brunswick and until he died in 1830.

Mrs. Fitzherbert’s high fashion is the lack of it. She’s lightly dressed, her hair flowing, with some décolletage, and a raised arm pointing a finger to her temple, a new gesture in female portraits signifying thoughtfulness or discernment. It’s the ultimate in dreamy informality. Across from her is Mary, the Duchess of Montagu from 1768, then in her late 50s. She’s no spring chicken, to be sure, and layers of fabric and a red velvet curtain behind her suggests some need to combat cold drafts. Still, what a look. A blue silk “robe à la franchise,” lots of lace, and a fly headdress tied under her chin framing brilliant cut-diamond earrings. If Mrs. Fitzherbert is a hoochie mama, the Duchess of Montagu is a beacon of dignity and refinement while aging. What a contrast.

Then there’s Sarah Hodges, Later Lady Innes from 1759, among the last portraits Gainsborough painted in his Suffolk period before moving to Bath. It’s a transition picture in that the figure seems lighter and less like a cutout. He draws from van Dyck’s poses and the centrality of lace and satin in van Dyck’s English scenes. Across from her in the gallery is Samuel Linley from 1778, 20 years later but they look good. Sarah Hodges was about 20 when Gainsborough painted her, Linley 18. The Hodges portrait is far more finished, so much so that her fancy dress seems too ornate for her and the rose garden background seems too dense and lush, at the edge of sinister. Linley’s dreamy and his clothes are minimalist.

The Linley family — mother, father, and seven children, one of which was Samuel — were musical prodigies, more evolved than the Jackson Five and stars in Covent Garden theater for not only singing but violin, harpsichord, and oboe, which was Samuel’s instrument. One child, Thomas, was called the English Mozart. Gainsborough was a family friend and painted many of them. Samuel decided to join the Navy and is likely wearing a midshipman’s uniform. He died in 1778 of a fever. The portrait looks unfinished, but Samuel was unfinished, too.

The magical, wistful, full-length portrait of Samuel’s sister, Elizabeth Linley, is in the last gallery. First painted in 1783, it depicted Elizabeth as a shepherdess with a basket, crook, and lamb. Gainsborough eliminated all three in the redo so she doesn’t look like Bo Peep. The Linley children tended to die young, and Elizabeth might well have wished she’d done so. She married Richard Brinsley Sheridan, by all accounts a bum, and died of TB at 38.

The final gallery of Fashion of Portraiture is mostly full length portraits like The Honorable Frances Duncombe, Gainsborough’s van Dyck copy, and the portrait of Elizabeth Linley, called Mrs. Sheridan. There’s lots of firepower here. Flanking the van Dyck copy are Frances on the right and Grace Dalrymple Elliott from 1778 on the left, the two ladies looking at the Lords Stuart. It’s a majestic wall. Grace was only 24 but had by then a line of affairs with rich and powerful men, among them Mrs. Fitzherbert’s Prince of Wales. She draws her van Dyck style gown toward her torso, a gesture of vulnerability, and looks modestly away but this dame’s no shrinking violet, though her hair’s tinted violet. With her low-cut dress, exposing powdered white skin, powdered face with heavy rouge, and her height — she was almost six feet — I don’t wonder how she got so many kill notches on her dance card.

This gallery doesn’t lack for testosterone. Captain Augustus John Hervey, Later 3rd Earl of Bristol from 1768 shows a man meticulously dressed for battle at sea. Juxtaposed against Mrs. Sheridan, part shepherdess, part forest nymph, is Gainsborough’s last painting: Bernard Howard, Later 12th Duke of Norfolk from 1788. Bernard was merely the 11th duke’s third cousin, but none of the 11th duke’s many children were legitimate and his wife went insane soon after their marriage and was locked away. Bernard’s wearing a van Dyck costume as the 11th duke did in an earlier portrait by Gainsborough, but Bernard’s excels in its touch of playacting. Bernard was only 23 and the 11th duke took care to prepare and to market him as his successor. Bernard and Gainsborough might have understood that Bernard would be playing the part of heir for a while. The 11th duke didn’t die until 1815.

Gainsborough’s portrait of Carl Friedrich Abel from 1777 shows how fancy men’s dress could be. Abel was a close friend of the artist and, with Bach, head of chamber music for Queen Charlotte. Blue lining peaks from his embroidered brown coat, worn over a lush silk gold waistcoat with lace cuffs poking from it. He sits in a crimson chair with a sweeping green curtain behind him. His viola da gamba is to his left, in warm redwood, and his dog by his right. Pomeranian and Puppy, also from 1777, depicts Abel’s dog and his or her pup, a nod to the English obsession with lineage. Gainsborough was a top dog painter and, as we know, dogs are often better behaved than children, more engaging, loyal to the death, and infinitely less likely to be ingrates.

I would have ditched Gainsborough Dupont, the very sketchy head portrait of Gainsborough’s nephew and, as far as we know, sole assistant. The show already has one pretty boy in Samuel Linley, also likely not finished or at least cursory, and Gainsborough Dupont isn’t a fashion picture, however timeless his free-flowing, wavy Tarzan hair might be. I can see why Ignatius Sancho is in the exhibition since it’s Gainsborough’s only portrait of a black man, but it’s a clunker. Mrs. Samuel Moody and her Sons, Samuel and Thomas, a full-length portrait from 1779, seems redundant. Between 1779 and Mrs. Murray’s death in 1782 she’d had two children. After her death, her husband asked Gainsborough to add them. The portrait counts as filler since the label and catalogue say nothing about her clothes.

I might have dropped the Duchess of Montagu, too, only because Margaret Gainsborough from 1778 is the zenith of old lady portraiture. What’s the need for two? She’s Gainsborough’s wife and among the last of the 30 portraits of her painted by her adoring husband, one around each wedding anniversary. A black mantle envelopes her, but her orange dress peeks at us so we know it’s not a mourning picture. Her look — directly at us — is a look a woman in her day would only give to her husband.

Overall, though, I’m in a heave-ho frame of mind since I’m afraid the Frick’s new special exhibition space is too small. With 27 paintings and, granted, ten are full-length portraits, the walls seemed too jammed. The galleries were certainly jammed, and I was there at 11 a.m. That’s a sign of a project well done — people love the new and improved Frick — and an exhibition that rightly appeals. Still, the new space might not do the trick over time.

The brilliant wall color through the show is Hidden Falls, a dark green with a touch of blue that works well with pink, red, pastel blue, and, of course, other shades of green since all greens, as in the forest, work well together. For fun and edification, I’d suggest a visit to the Frick’s galleries displaying portraits by Hogarth, Reynolds, Romney, Raeburn, Lawrence, van Dyck, and Whistler. It’s a mini-survey of British portraiture.