Past

Forty-five masterpieces of Japanese and Chinese porcelain in elaborate European metal mounts began a three-museum tour at the Frick Collection. A number of drawings related to these unusual works of art were also on view. Organized and circulated by the International Exhibitions Foundation in Washington, D.C., this exhibition presented a wide range of exotic objects created for the high society of their time.

This group of works by Ingres, culled from the thousands of drawings the French master bequeathed to his native town of Montauban at his death in 1867, was selected by the French-Israeli artist Avigdor Arikha. The fifty drawings were done in a wide range of media and cover all periods of the artist's long and prolific career. They included landscapes and portraits, as well as figural, drapery and compositional studies. The exhibition traveled from The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,where it was shown earlier in the year.

The Trustees of the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art graciously lent Ingres's portrait of the Princesse de Broglie to The Frick Collection to be exhibited alongside the Frick portrait of the subject's sister-in-law, the Comtesse d’Haussonville, as a complement to the exhibition J.-A.-D. Ingres: Fifty Life Drawings from the Musée Ingres at Montauban. This occasion marked the first time the two portraits have been seen together since the posthumous Ingres exhibition of 1867.

The Frick Collection's first show built around a single work of art was a loan exhibition devoted to Ingres's celebrated portrait of the Comtesse d'Haussonville.  The exhibition documented the evolution of the portrait, from hesistant sketches to the brilliant final canvas, and the life and character of the subject, including Mme. d'Haussonville's memoirs and her will.

In commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of the American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), The Frick Collection exhibited all of its Whistler holdings. Whistler's The Ocean (left), three pastels of Venice, twelve etchings from his famous "Venice Set," a lithograph of Robert, Comte de Montesquiou-Fezensac, and two letters written to Montesquiou and R.A. Canfield were on view in the lower-level gallery. The four full-length portraits by Whistler of Miss Rosa Corder, Mrs. Frederick R.

This important exhibition of terracotta sculptures by the French master Claude Michel (1738–1814), called Clodion, included eleven works from North American museums and private collections, and two signed and dated works in The Frick Collection: the Satyr with Two Bacchantes (1766) and the Zephyrus and Flora (1799). Executed from 1765 to 1802, the terracottas in the exhibition span nearly all of Clodion's long career, from the early productions of his Roman years to work executed during the reign of Napoleon.

An unprecedented exhibition of nearly one hundred French clocks on loan from North American collections. One of a series of loan exhibitions intended to focus attention on lesser-known aspects of the collection’s holdings, French Clocks in North American Collections was organized around the four remarkable eighteenth-century French clocks in the museum. Related examples by the craftsmen who produced these clocks form the nucleus of the exhibition, which extends its scope back to the Renaissance and forward into the early nineteenth century.

A special exhibition devoted to White, Allom & Co., the decorating firm responsible for many of the first-floor interiors of The Frick Collection, centered around what is believed to be the decorator’s model for the Library, on loan from the Museum of the City of New York. Also included were a number of the collection’s own studies by White, Allom & Co. for furniture designed especially for the residence of Henry Clay Frick, as well as several woodcarvings by Abraham Miller, a craftsman associated with the firm, who carved the Library’s mantelpiece with floral garlands.

All of the Rembrandt prints in The Frick Collection were on display for the first time in many years. Freshly cleaned, restored, and mounted in new mats, the prints offer brilliant testimony to Rembrandt’s intensity and range of expression and to his virtuoso mastery of the etching technique. The eleven prints included religious subjects, portraits, and landscapes.

The Frick Collection once again presented an exhibition of William Blake's illustrations for John Bunyan's Pilgrim’s Progress. The exhibition complemented the collection of Blake's watercolors and illuminated books then on view at the Morgan Library.