The Frick Collection is pleased to announce the loan of nine Old Master paintings from the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, one of the major collections of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pictures in the world. The exhibition, which heralds the Gallery’s bicentenary in 2011, will introduce American audiences to this institution’s collection through an exceptional group of works, to be shown exclusively at the Frick from March 9 through May 30, 2010.

Dulwich Picture Gallery houses one of the world's most important collections of European old master paintings of the 1600s and 1700s. The collection is also one of the oldest in Great Britain, substantially put together in the years 1790 to 1795. The paintings are housed in the first purpose-built art gallery in England, designed by Sir John Soane in 1811.

A native of Suffolk, Gainsborough was trained in London in the milieu of Hogarth and the popular French rococo. He worked in Sudbury and Ipswich and rose to fame as a portrait painter in the fashionable resort of Bath. Gainsborough joined the Royal Academy as a founding member and in 1774 returned to London, where he became Reynolds’ major competitor. He later was patronized by the royal family. Although he claimed to prefer landscape painting to portraiture, Gainsborough excelled at capturing the likenesses of Georgian society.