Past

With extraordinary generosity, the Musée du Louvre loaned one of the most celebrated icons of French art: Nicolas Poussin's The Arcadian Shepherds. This image of four shepherds solemnly meditating over the inscription they have discovered on a tomb — Et in Arcadia Ego (“Even in Arcadia [there] am I”) — has come to be regarded as the quintessence of the art of Poussin (1594-1665).

An exhibition of fourteen paintings and four sculptures from the collection of Baroness Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza. French, Italian, British, German, Spanish, and American artists were represented in works that ranged from scenes by the Italian vedutisti of the eighteenth-century to masterpieces by French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters.

An exhibition of two remarkable portraits of famous men lent by the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia: an oil on canvas representing Benjamin Franklin painted by Jean-Baptiste Greuze in 1777, and a marble bust of Nicolas de Condorcet executed by Jean-Antoine Houdon in 1785. Also on view was a small group of letters, manuscripts, and eighteenth-century publications relating to the history of the two portraits and the relations between the American statesman and the mathematician, philosopher, and revolutionary.

An exhibition of forty-one medals, a print by Rembrandt, and a spectacular silver-gilt standing cup with cover, dated 1639, by Jan Lutma the Elder, all chosen and catalogued by guest curator Stephen K. Scher.  The exhibition focused on Dutch medals of the seventeenth century, preceded by a sampling of sixteenth-century Italian and Netherlandish examples.  Almost all of the examples are in silver, and most are cast, although large struck medals are equally important and impressive.

An exhibition of more than fifty Italian Old Master drawings selected from the Ratjen Foundation in Vaduz, Liechtenstein. Unfamiliar to American audiences, these drawings were assembled over three decades by Dr. Wolfgang Ratjen, who established the foundation to provide a permanent home for his collection. Works in the exhibition spanned some 250 years, beginning with Guilo Romano in the first half of the sixteenth century, continuing with a strong preference for baroque and rococo sketches, and ending with a few neoclassical studies from the late eighteenth century.

On loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Joseph Mallord William Turner's Mortlake Terrace, Summer’s Evening of 1827 hung for six months beside its companion piece, The Frick Collection's Mortlake Terrace: Early Summer Morning, executed a year earlier. Both were painted for William Moffatt and depict The Limes, Moffatt's home overlooking the Thames at Mortlake, near Kew Gardens to the west of central London.

An exhibition of some fifty architectural drawings, highlights of the renowned collection of 30,000 works housed in Sir John Soane's Museum in London. The exhibition included works by Italian Renaissance masters; leading British architects of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (among them Sir Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor); near contemporaries of Soane such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam, and George Dance the Younger; and the master himself. The drawings were virtually unknown to the public, and they had never before been exhibited outside England.

A small exhibition focused on a pair of pastel portraits by Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805) that had recently been acquired by the museum: Baptiste Aîné and Madame Baptiste Aîné. Executed in Paris in the early 1790s, these dramatic images of a famous actor and his wife belong to an impressive series of portraits that Greuze painted and drew during the turbulent years of the French Revolution.

Another in-depth exhibition devoted to a single painting in The Frick Collection, this one focused on Whistler's celebrated portrait Arrangement in Black and Gold: Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, first exhibited in 1894.

American audiences were offered their first comprehensive introduction to drawings and watercolors from the "Golden Age" of Danish art (1815–48) at The Frick Collection. The selection of seventy-two examples from the rich holdings of Denmark's premier art museum included portraits, landscapes, city views, genre and mythological scenes by eleven of the nation's finest artists.