Cincinnati Art Museum’s 2010-11 season gets underway Saturday with the debut of Thomas Gainsborough and the Modern Woman, a small (16 paintings) but important attempt to use the English painter’s 18th Century portraits of women as a means to study Georgian England’s attitudes toward women in society.
The show celebrates the restoration of the museum’s “Ann Ford (later Mrs. Philip Thicknesse),” a 1760 Gainsborough portrait of an unconventional woman with a groundbreaking (for the time) interest in arts. Other Gainsborough portraits of women are on loan from the Met, the Huntington and the National Gallery of London.
The show is on display through Jan. 2. It was organized by Benedict Leca, the museum’s curator of European painting, sculpture and drawings.
Go here for exhibit and museum details.
This article appears in Sep 8-14, 2010.