Past

The Stanford Museum collection of drawings was one of the largest such university collections in the country, distinguished particularly for its holdings in works from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

An exhibition of approximately one hundred works by John Constable (1776–1837) was devoted to his primary interest, landscape. The assembled group, spanning the artist's entire career, came from a private collection; virtually none of the works had been previously shown in this country.

The first major survey in America on the art of the Renaissance portrait medal, on display in the Garden Court. The exhibition was co-organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and The Frick Collection and included more than 170 of the most important and beautiful medals from the major European centers of production: Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and England.

More than seventy watercolors from the print room of the Rijksmuseum were on view at The Frick Collection. The exhibition comprised supreme examples of one very special form of art from Holland's so-called Silver Age (1700–1800): the watercolor drawing. The selection made by Dr. J. W. Niemeijer, Emeritus Director of the print room and guest curator for the exhibition, introduced to the American public a chapter of Dutch art that was little known in this country.

An exhibition of French Renaissance furniture and Old Master prints and drawings belonging to The Frick Collection. The furniture was selected for display to celebrate the long-awaited appearance of Volumes V & VI of The Frick Collection: An Illustrated Catalogue, devoted to the Collection's unusually rich holdings of furniture and gilt bronzes.

In 1965 Childs Frick, son of Henry Clay Frick, left by bequest 220 pieces of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain that he and his wife had purchased over many years. They had chosen the pieces as birthday and Christmas presents and displayed them in thier home in Roslyn, Long Island. A selection later decorated the offices and upstairs staff rooms of the Collection. In the autumn of 1992, for the first time, a large number of pieces were placed on permanent display in the Reception Hall, in specially designed new cases.

An exhibition composed of watercolors illustrating more than sixty nineteenth-century interiors, from cottages to palaces.  Just as proud owners today might wish to preserve the appearance of their homes on film, polaroid, or video, the householders of the last century frequently engaged artists to record their dwellings.  The works in the exhibition were chosen from two private collections — one American, the other European — which together provided a unique survey of this very special genre of nineteenth-century art.

A focused exhibition placing a Hercules attributed to Antonio del Pollaiuolo in the collection of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin side by side with the Frick's own bronze Hercules attributed to the same artist. Questions of the authorship and dating of both pieces were considered. The Collection also borrowed, for comparison with the bronzes, one painting and several prints and drawings, all by or closely related to Pollaioulo.

Vincent van Gogh's luminous landscape, Flowering Garden, executed by the artist at Arles in the summer of 1888, was placed on loan by a private foundation for a two-year period. Flowering Garden is a large vertical canvas depicting the flat expanse of a field of flowers, framed on the right by the wall of a farmhouse and trees, and at the high horizon by a line of low farm buildings with red-tiled roofs.

The first exhibition devoted entirely to the work of this long-neglected French Rococo master who during his lifetime was one of Europe’s most celebrated artists. The prolific Lancret was a favorite of Louis XV and Frederick the Great as well as of international nobility, but during the nineteenth century he fell under the shadow of his mentor Antoine Watteau. Lancret in fact had a singular and brilliant talent of his own, as this exhibition demonstrated.