Past

The Frick continued to add to its holdings, and the 1997 gift of a painting inspired a major 2006 exhibition on the artist Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702-1789). This presentation offerd the public a singular opportunity to become better acquainted with one of the most original and engaging artists of eighteenth-century Europe, who enjoyed an international reputation in his day, often painting portraits of monarchs and their children in London, Vienna, Parma, and Amsterdam.

The art of Paolo Veronese (1528–1588) is inextricably linked to the idea of opulence and splendor in Renaissance Venice. His paintings are grandiose visions of the richness and spectacle of sixteenth-century Venetian life. Crowded compositions with theatrical effects, in which groups of sumptuously dressed people re-enact religious and secular events, have become synonymous with Veronese’s oeuvre, and his dazzling and effective use of color has been praised and celebrated over the centuries.

Goya’s understated portrait of the woman known as María Martínez de Puga, acquired by Henry Clay Frick in 1914, was the inspiration for The Frick Collection’s special exhibition Goya’s Last Works. It was the first show in the United States to concentrate exclusively on the final phase of Goya’s long career — the years of the artist’s voluntary exile in Bordeaux from 1824 to 1828. Fifty-one examples of Goya’s final production were borrowed from public and private European and North American collections.

Memling’s Portraits, The Frick Collection’s special fall exhibition, offered the most comprehensive gathering to date of works in this genre by the celebrated Netherlandish artist Hans Memling (c. 1435-1494). Memling’s oeuvre comprises some one hundred paintings, of which thirty are portraits. Executed in Bruges between 1470 and the artist’s death some twenty-five years later, his portraits bear eloquent witness to “Memling’s exasperatingly seamless evolution,” as noted in 1998 by Memling scholar Dirk De Vos.

During the spring and summer of 2005, The Frick Collection presented a selection of approximately seventy drawings from the Schlossmuseum and the Goethe-Nationalmuseum in Weimar, Germany, offering visitors a unique opportunity to view many works that have never before been exhibited outside the former Eastern bloc countries.

The two magnificent carpets on display in the Oval Room beginning May 10 were among the fewer than five hundred that survive from the court of the Mughal emperors. Woven in northern India in the mid-seventeenth century, these carpets were luxurious objects in terms of both the fabrics used to make them (silk and cashmere) and the artistically complex patterns that they display. The Frick carpets date from the reign of Shah Jahan (1628–58) and were probably made at the royal factory in Lahore, one of India's main cities for carpet production.

The Fitzwilliam Museum's collection of Renaissance and Baroque bronzes is one of the finest in Great Britain. Beginning February 15, The Frick Collection presented thirty-six of the Fitzwilliam's bronzes, many of which have never before been seen in America. Dating from the turn of the sixteenth century to the early years of the eighteenth century — the period that saw the flowering of the bronze statuette as an independent art form — the sculptures are remarkable for their beauty and refinement.

This installation celebrated Walter A. and Vera Eberstadt's notable gift of Giovanni Francesco Susini's Lion Attacking a Horse and Leopard Attacking a Bull to The Frick Collection in 2002. The drawings, prints, books, and objects on display illustrated the subject of combating animals, as it was handed down from classical antiquity and transformed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art.

From December 2004 through January 2005, in collaboration with the Foundation for Italian Art & Culture, The Frick Collection displayed La Fornarina by Raphael Sanzio (1483-1520) from the National Gallery of Art at the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. Painted around 1518 and signed by the artist, this celebrated work has never before been exhibited in the United States.

Created to delight and engage their audiences over countless viewings, bronze statuettes enjoyed immense popularity with rulers and the wealthy educated classes who collected them between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. The Frick Collection was pleased to have, as its special fall exhibition, European Bronzes from the Quentin Collection, the first public presentation of a distinguished, little-known private collection devoted to the art of these small- and medium-scale sculptures.