Past

An exibition of some sixty drawings recently acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago. The drawings included a wide range of works from many countries and periods, including superb examples by such well-known masters as Annibale Carracci, Hubert Robert, Gainsborough, Gericault, Monet, Redon, and Renoir. Among them were also two exceptionally fine landscapes by Claude Lorrain, a brooding, dark self-portrait by Joseph Wright of Derby, and an early Delacroix figure study which might almost be taken for one by Degas.

The creation, growth, and present-day role of The Frick Art Reference Library was the focus of a special exhibition marking the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the institution. The first section of the exhibition surveyed the Library's history from its foundation to the present. Photographs, architectural plans, records, maps, newspaper clippings, and artifacts documented the Library's growth from its early acquisition of materials to the time of the construction of the first building (1924) and the current location (1935) at 10 East 71st Street.

An exhibition of seventy-eight drawings and watercolors lent from the Nationalgalerie in East Berlin, which holds over 4,000 of the extant Menzel drawings. This survey of the great German master's career was the first exhibition devoted to his work in the United States.

A major exhibition of 142 pieces, ranging from bowls to wine pots, dishes, jars, vases, and a figurine, the exhibition provided a survey of some of the finest porcelain produced in China during the so-called Transitional Period between 1620 and 1683. The pieces in the exhibition were selected from over 600 objects collected over several decades by retired British diplomat Sir Michael Butler.

A loan exhibition of watercolors and drawings by the celebrated eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson. The eighty-four works in this exhibition were drawn from forty international collections both public and private. Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) was a colorful personality and a versatile and prolific artist best known for portraying aristocrats and the English middle class with an eye for comic incident.

On the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, The Frick Collection presented an unprecedented loan exhibition of seventeen pictures, spanning the period from the Renaissance to the late eighteenth century.

An exhibition focusing on the cities of Venice and Paris as depicted in paintings, drawings, and prints in The Frick Collection. The exhibition included two canvases depicting scenes of Venice by Francesco Guardi that are normally displayed in the main reading room of the Frick Art Reference Library; three pastels of Venetian subjects by J.A.M. Whistler; the twelve etchings that comprised Whistler’s First Venice Set; and thirteen etchings by Charles Meryon providing vivid images of Paris as it appeared in the mid-nineteenth century.

An exhibition of sixty watercolors by Granet lent by The Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence, organized by The Frick Collection. The works were painted after 1830 and show views of Paris, Versailles, and the Ile-de-France. After New York, the show traveled to the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Throughout the duration of the Fragonard exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Frick Collection exhibited all fourteen of its canvases composing Jean-Honoré Fragonard's The Progress of Love, an ensemble that Pierre Rosenberg, chief curator of paintings at the Louvre, succinctly describes in his catalogue of the exhibition as "the artist’s masterpiece."  

An exhibition of works by eighteenth-century French artist Jean-Baptiste Le Prince (1734–1781), who won fame in his native country for his colorful depictions of life in contemporary Russia. Included were the twenty-eight surviving drawings, on loan from the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, that were executed by Le Prince to illustrate Abbé Jean Chappe d'Auteroche's Voyage en Sibérie, published in 1768.