Past

In collaboration with the Meadows Museum, Dallas, and the Auckland Castle Trust, County Durham, England, The Frick Collection co-organized an exhibition of Jacob and His Twelve Sons, an ambitious series of thirteen life-size paintings that depict the Old Testament figures. On loan from Auckland Castle, the works by the Spanish Golden Age master Francisco de Zurbarán had never traveled to the United States before they were presented at the Meadows Museum in the fall of 2017.

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo was one of the finest painters of the Spanish Golden Age; this exhibition brought together the only two known self-portraits by him, one in The Frick Collection, and one in the National Gallery, London, along with a small selection of additional works by the artist.

The Frick Collection presented Veronese in Murano: Two Venetian Renaissance Masterpieces Restored, a focused exhibition, organized by Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator Xavier F. Salomon, on two recently conserved and rarely seen paintings by the celebrated artist Paolo Veronese (1528–1588), St. Jerome in the Wilderness and St. Agatha Visited in Prison by St. Peter. While the paintings are known to scholars, their remote location in a church in Murano, an island in the lagoon of Venice, has made them difficult to study. The exhibition provided a unique opportunity for an international audience to discover these two masterpieces in New York.

This year-long installation in the Portico Gallery was inspired by the generous gift of fourteen pieces of Du Paquier porcelain given to the Frick in 2016 by Paul Sullivan and Trustee Melinda Martin Sullivan. Although in operation for only twenty-five years, the Du Paquier manufactory left an impressive body of inventive and often whimsical work, forging a distinct identity in the history of European porcelain production. The exhibition featured about forty tureens, drinking vessels, platters, and other objects produced by Du Paquier between 1720 and 1740.

On loan from a private collection, Rembrandt's Abraham Entertaining the Angels of 1646 was the centerpiece of a small exhibition dedicated to the artist's depictions of Abraham and his various encounters with God and his angels, as recounted in the book of Genesis. In the painting and in the other works included in the show — a tightly focused selection of prints and drawings and a single copper plate — Rembrandt explored, in different media, the nature of divine presence and the ways it was perceived.

Celebrating the largest acquisition in the Frick’s history, a gift of approximately 450 portrait medals from the incomparable collection of Stephen K. and Janie Woo Scher, the exhibition explored one of the most important artistic inventions of the Renaissance. The selection showcased superlative examples by masters of the medium — many of whom were also celebrated painters, sculptors, and printmakers — from Pisanello in the Italian Renaissance to Pierre-Jean David d’Angers in nineteenth-century France, honoring medals as integral to the history of portraiture in Western art and as a triumph of sculpture on a small scale.

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Britain’s greatest land- and seascape painter of the nineteenth century, explored the theme of the port throughout his career. This exhibition centered around the Frick’s Harbor of Dieppe and Cologne, uniting them with a closely related yet unfinished work from Tate, London, that depicts the harbor of Brest, in Brittany. The trio was accompanied by more than thirty of Turner’s oil paintings, watercolors, sketchbooks, and prints.

The Frick Collection presented the first exhibition on Pierre Gouthière (1732–1813), the great French bronze chaser and gilder who worked for Louis XV and Louis XVI. The exhibition shed new light on the artist’s production, life, and workshop through the presentation of twenty-two objects from public and private collections. Attributed with certainty to Gouthière, these works include clocks, vases, firedogs, wall lights, and mounts for Chinese porcelain and hardstone vases. The exhibition was organized by Charlotte Vignon, Curator of Decorative Arts, The Frick Collection. Based on new art historical and technical research, the exhibition and catalogue promise to transform our understanding of one of the greatest artists of eighteenth-century France.

Guido Cagnacci was one of the most eccentric painters of seventeenth-century Italy, infamous for the unconventionality of both his art and his lifestyle. Born in Romagna in 1601, he lived and worked in his native region as well as in Venice, concluding his career in imperial Vienna. His works, mostly religious in subject, are known for their unabashed, often unsettling eroticism, and his biography is no less intriguing.

It would be difficult to think of an artist further removed from the muck and misery of war than Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), who is known as a painter of amorous aristocrats and melancholy actors. And yet, early in his career, Watteau painted a number of scenes of military life. They were produced during one of the darkest chapters of France’s history, the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), but the martial glory on which most military painters trained their gaze held no interest for Watteau.