Past

Between 1820 and 1826, John Constable (1776–1837) executed three oil sketches and three finished paintings depicting Salisbury Cathedral from the south side, rising over the green expanse of the bishop's grounds. All are linked to a commission of 1822 from Constable's friend and patron Bishop John Fisher, who asked him to develop one of the sketches into a finished work. Instead, Constable set out afresh, producing a canvas for the bishop that he exhibited to critical acclaim at the Royal Academy in 1823.

In another in a series of single-picture loan exhibitions, The Frick Collection displayed for three months one of the most famous paintings by Édouard Manet (1832-83), The Dead Toreador, on loan from the National Gallery of Art, Washington. It was hung beside the Collection's own Manet oil, The Bullfight. Both paintings were originally part of a larger work, Incident in a Bullfight, exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1864.

The Medieval Housebook, a compendium of secular texts accompanied by full-page pen-and-ink illustrations, many of them enhanced with color, presented a remarkable view of life in a princely court at the end of the late Middle Ages. The book, which has been in the family of the counts of Waldburg Wolfegg since the end of the seventeenth century, was temporarily disbound for the creation of a facsimile edition, providing a unique opportunity to display the individual sheets.

This exhibition of sixty-seven drawings from the collection of the National Gallery of Canada was organized by that museum in collaboration with The Frick Collection. It offered a rich sampling of the treasures assembled by the Department of Prints and Drawings since its founding in 1921, including works by Boucher and Degas acquired only last year. On the English side, artists represented include Bonington, Constable, Flaxman, Hogarth, Palmer, and Turner; among the French artists are Courbet, David, Delacroix, Fragonard, Greuze, Redon, and Watteau.

On view for the first time in the United States, the celebrated full-length portrait of Madame de Pompadour by the French artist François-Hubert Drouais (1727–75) was presented at New York's Frick Collection. Regarded as one of the greatest and most popular treasures at the National Gallery in London, the portrait was the last one painted of the Marquise de Pompadour, the influential mistress of French King Louis XV.

This exhibition presented drawings from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries that displayed several modes of depicting figures. Some were drawings of figures or costumes copied from life and intended as preparatory studies for painted compositions. Others were individual or grouped figures that spring from the artist's imagination or are based on his observation of the world around him. Whether compositional studies or finished works of art, all the drawings focused on the figure as a means of exploring form, narrative, or individual spirit.

Critically and commercially popular during the nineteenth century,  the intriguing and distinctly British genre of Victorian fairy painting was the subject of an exhibition at The Frick Collection. The roughly thirty paintings and works on paper were selected by Edgar Munhall, Curator of The Frick Collection, from a comprehensive touring exhibition — the first of its type for this subject. The original exhibition was organized by the University of Iowa Museum of Art and the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Continuing its series of single-picture loan exhibitions, The Frick Collection had on display for two months Claude Monet's Vétheuil in Summer from the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, hanging near the Collection's own Monet oil Vétheuil in Winter. The juxtaposition in the North Hall of these two contemporary works depicting the same site viewed from across the Seine in summer and in winter followed the highly successful run of the exhibition "Monet at Vétheuil" presented earlier this year at the University of Michigan Museum of Art and elsewhere.

The age of Goethe, Beethoven, and Kant was also a brilliant period for the visual arts in Germany. This exhibition — culled from the holdings of the Winterstein family of Munich, the world's most comprehensive and important private collection of German drawings and watercolors of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — afforded viewers an opportunity to study fine works by forty-nine artists from the greatest period of German drawing.

Sixty-six drawings and watercolors by the renowned eighteenth-century architect Robert Adam, his brother and partner James, and artists employed in their office were on view at The Frick Collection from December 16, 1997, through April 5, 1998. The works were selected from the 9,000 Adam drawings acquired by Sir John Soane in 1833, virtually all of the surviving sheets that were kept by Robert and James Adam themselves.