Past

Born in Parma and known as Parmigianino after his native city, Francesco Mazzola (1503–1540) lived only thirty-seven years, yet his eloquent, innovative art inspired his contemporaries to name him “Raphael reborn” and praise him as one of the greatest painters of his age. During his short life, Parmigianino was especially esteemed for his portraits. Today his Schiava Turca, an exquisite depiction of a young woman, is an icon in the city of Parma and admired as an expression of ideal female beauty in the tradition of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.

Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741–1828) and Claude Michel, called Clodion (1738–1814), were two of the foremost sculptors in France during the late eighteenth century, and the Frick housed an important group of their works. In 1915 founder Henry Clay Frick acquired Clodion’s terracotta Zephyrus and Flora and, the following year, Houdon’s marble bust of the Comtesse du Cayla. Other works that were subsequently added to the collection were shown together for the first time, highlighting the artists’ expressive ranges, as well as their defining contributions to the sculpture of Enlightenment-era France. MORE »

The Frick Collection was the only venue for the first public exhibition of this private collection devoted to the bronze figurative statuette. The nearly forty sculptures included in the show were of exceptional quality and span the fifteenth through the eighteenth century, exemplifying the genre from its beginnings in Renaissance Italy to its dissemination across the artistic centers of Europe. The Hill Collection is distinguished by rare, autograph masterpieces by Italian sculptors such as Andrea Riccio, Giambologna, and Giuseppe Piamontini. MORE »

The Frick Collection was the final American venue of a global tour of paintings from the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis in The Hague, the Netherlands.

Lauded by Victor Hugo as the Michelangelo of Paris, French sculptor Pierre-Jean David d’Angers (1788–1856) produced many of the most iconic portraits and ambitious public monuments of the Romantic era. An experimental writer, outspoken Republican, and teacher to some of the greatest sculptors of the nineteenth century, David d’Angers cultivated friendships with an array of contemporary artists, writers, scientists, and politicians — from Honoré de Balzac and Niccolò Paganini to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Eugène Delacroix. This exhibition included forty-eight works by David on paper and in wax, terracotta, marble, bronze, and plaster, as well as rare nineteenth-century reproductions of his work in photographs and engravings.

This exhibition presented a selection of nineteenth-century French drawings and prints from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Sheets by Millet, Courbet, Degas, Manet, Pissarro, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, and other masters are on view. Ranging widely in subject matter and technique and spanning the entire second half of the nineteenth century, these works represent the diverse interests of Realist, Impressionist, and Post-Impressionist artists in a rapidly changing world.

Revered in his own time as a "monarch" of painting, Piero della Francesca (1411/13–1492) is acknowledged today as a founding figure of the Italian Renaissance. In early 2013, The Frick Collection presented the first monographic exhibition in the United States dedicated to the artist. It brought together seven works by Piero della Francesca, including six panels from the Saint’ Agostino altarpiece — the largest number from this masterwork ever reassembled. 

The Frick Collection has one of the most important public collections of European timepieces in the United States, much of it acquired through the 1999 bequest of the New York collector Winthrop Kellogg Edey. This extraordinary gift of thirty-eight watches and clocks dating from the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century covers the art of horology in France, Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. For reasons of space, only part of the collection can be on permanent view in the museum’s galleries. In 2001, many pieces from the Edey collection were featured in The Art of the Timekeeper: Masterpieces from the Winthrop Edey Bequest, an exhibition organized at the Frick by guest curator William J. H. Andrewes. In 2013, visitors had another opportunity to explore the breadth and significance of the Edey collection through an exhibition that presented fourteen watches and eleven clocks from his bequest.

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) painted his Portrait of a Peasant (Patience Escalier) in August 1888 during a highly productive fifteen-month stay in Arles in southern France. The opportunity to display this work in New York was the result of a special exchange program between the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, and The Frick Collection and marked the first time in forty years that the painting had left its home institution.

In keeping with its tradition of exhibiting masterworks from collections outside of New York, the Frick presented fifty-eight drawings from The Courtauld Gallery, London. This exhibition marked the first time that so many of the principal drawings in The Courtauld's renowned collection — one of Britain's most important — have been made available for loan. The prized sheets represent a survey of the extraordinary draftsmanship of Italian, Dutch, Flemish, German, Spanish, British, and French artists active between the late Middle Ages and the early twentieth century.