Past

The Frick presented three Manet canvases from the collection of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California.

The Frick Collection presented the first-ever exhibition on the Florentine sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni (ca. 1440–1491), a renowned student of Donatello, a teacher of Michelangelo, and a great favorite of Lorenzo “il Magnifico” de’ Medici, his principal patron.

The Frick Collection presented a temporary installation of the work of sculptor Edmund de Waal — a rich juxtaposition of site-specific objects displayed in the main galleries of the museum, alongside works from the permanent collection.

The Frick Collection was pleased to announce a promised gift of forty-two works on paper by James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), from the collection of Gertrude Kosovsky. This selection of fifteen prints and one pastel from the gift, presented different aspects of the American expatriate’s prolific activity as a printmaker over the course of his career.

The Frick Collection presented a selection of paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs related to Giambattista Tiepolo’s first significant project outside of Venice, a series of ceiling frescoes for Palazzo Archinto in Milan that were destroyed during World War II.

Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture was the first major exhibition in the United States to focus on the portraiture of Giovanni Battista Moroni (1520/24–1579/80), an essential figure in the northern Italian tradition of naturalistic painting. The Frick presented about twenty of the artist’s most arresting portraits together with a selection of complementary objects — jewelry, textiles, armor, and other luxury items — that evoked the material world of the artist and his sitters and revealed his inventiveness in translating it into paint.

Of the many artists who flourished in Rome during the eighteenth century, the silversmith Luigi Valadier (1726–1785) was particularly admired by popes, royalty, and aristocrats across Europe. Luigi Valadier: Splendor in Eighteenth-Century Rome, curated by Alvar González-Palacios, brought together more than sixty extraordinary works by the renowned silversmith in celebration of his unsurpassed technical expertise and avant-garde aesthetic.

The exhibition in the Portico Gallery presented a promised gift to The Frick Collection: seventy-five objects from the collection of Sidney R. Knafel — the finest collection of French faience in private hands — to tell the fascinating and complex history of this particular art form.

For the first time in twenty-four years and only the second time in their history, two masterpieces of early Netherlandish painting commissioned by the Carthusian monk Jan Vos were reunited. These works, The Frick Collection’s Virgin and Child with St. Barbara, St. Elizabeth, and Jan Vos, commissioned from Jan van Eyck and The Virgin and Child with St. Barbara and Jan Vos, painted by Petrus Christus, were shown with a selection of objects that place them in the rich monastic context for which they were created. 

Canova’s George Washington examined the history of acclaimed sculptor Antonio Canova's lost masterpiece, a full-length statue of George Washington depicted in ancient Roman garb, drafting his farewell address to the states. The exhibition brings together Canova’s full-sized preparatory plaster model (which had never left Italy), four preparatory sketches for the sculpture, and related engravings and drawings, as well as Thomas Lawrence’s 1816 oil portrait of Canova, which, like the model and several sketches, was on loan from the Gypsotheca e Museo Antonio Canova in Possagno, Italy, the birthplace of the artist.