Past

In this exhibition, Parmigianino’s Antea, a special loan from the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples, was exhibited in the United States for the first time in more than twenty years. Although it is widely recognized as a masterpiece of Italian Renaissance female portraiture, little is known about the painting: its date is not firmly established, it is unclear why or for whom the portrait was painted, and the sitter’s identity is a mystery.

The Frick Collection presented an exhibition devoted to the art of Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, one of the most original and innovative French artists of the Enlightenment. The fruit of many years’ research by curators on both sides of the Atlantic, the exhibition was the first major Saint-Aubin retrospective in more than eighty years and the first ever to include works from both European and North American collections. It was also the first such collaborative effort between The Frick Collection and the Musée du Louvre, where the show will be on view from February 27 to May 26, 2008.

For the first time since their arrival at the Frick mansion in 1915, the principal panels of Jean-Honoré Fragonard'sProgress of Love series were seen in dramatically different, partly-skylit illumination and outside of their long-standing gallery installation. These monumental works are a major attraction at the museum, and they were temporarily placed on view in the East Gallery while the Fragonard Room underwent its first major relighting and refurbishment in seventy-five years.

In mid eighteenth-century France, elaborately mounted Asian porcelains were at the height of fashion. More Far Eastern porcelains with gilt bronze mounts were produced in the period between 1740 and 1760 than at any other point in European history, and Paris was the center of this phenomenon. Commissioned by the Parisian marchands merciers, or luxury merchants, artisans produced exquisite gilt bronze confections to adorn imported porcelains and often modified the porcelains themselves in order to adapt them to the décor of French interiors.

George Stubbs (1724–1806): A Celebration, an exhibition of approximately twenty paintings by the celebrated artist, came in early 2007 to The Frick Collection, its only North American venue. The exhibition marked the bicentenary of Stubbs’s death by presenting some of his greatest contributions to the tradition of British eighteenth-century painting, all notable for their originality and beauty.

For many years, The Frick Collection has offered its visitors the chance to view important Old Master paintings from American institutions outside the New York area. In keeping with this tradition, the Frick presented fourteen extraordinary works from the renowned Cleveland Museum of Art. Ranging in date from the early Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century, the selection included canvases by artists represented in the Frick’s permanent collection alongside paintings by important masters not typically seen at the museum.

The eighteenth-century Venetian painter and draftsman Domenico Tiepolo is best known for his drawn narrative cycles of thecommedia dell’ arte character Punchinello and engaging scenes of everyday life in the Veneto. He reserved his greatest passion, however, for sacred subjects.

In 2000, The Frick Collection’s Flagellation of Christ was confirmed to be by the artist Cenni di Pepo (c. 1240–c. 1302), known as Cimabue, following the discovery ofThe Virgin and Child Enthroned with Two Angels (now in the National Gallery, London), a panel known to have been painted by the Florentine master.

The two magnificent carpets on display in the Oval Room beginning July 25 were among the fewer than five hundred that survive from the court of the Mughal emperors. Woven in northern India in the mid-seventeenth century, these carpets were luxurious objects in terms of both the fabrics used to make them (silk and cashmere) and the artistically complex patterns that they display. The Frick carpets date from the reign of Shah Jahan (1628–1658) and were probably made at the royal factory in Lahore, one of India’s main cities for carpet production.

A magnificent late still life painting by Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) entitled Bouilloire et Fruits (Pitcher and Fruit)  was lent from a private collection and remained on view in the North Hall for approximately one year. Painted around 1888–90, it hung with other Impressionist and post-Impressionist works in The Frick Collection including Claude Monet's Vétheuil in Winter and Edgar Degas's recently cleaned Rehearsal, both dating from 1878–79.