#frickcollection

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Britain’s greatest land- and seascape painter of the nineteenth century, explored the theme of the port throughout his career. This exhibition centered around the Frick’s Harbor of Dieppe and Cologne, uniting them with a closely related yet unfinished work from Tate, London, that depicts the harbor of Brest, in Brittany. The trio was accompanied by more than thirty of Turner’s oil paintings, watercolors, sketchbooks, and prints.

Guido Cagnacci was one of the most eccentric painters of seventeenth-century Italy, infamous for the unconventionality of both his art and his lifestyle. Born in Romagna in 1601, he lived and worked in his native region as well as in Venice, concluding his career in imperial Vienna. His works, mostly religious in subject, are known for their unabashed, often unsettling eroticism, and his biography is no less intriguing.

The Frick Collection presented the first exhibition on Pierre Gouthière (1732–1813), the great French bronze chaser and gilder who worked for Louis XV and Louis XVI. The exhibition shed new light on the artist’s production, life, and workshop through the presentation of twenty-two objects from public and private collections. Attributed with certainty to Gouthière, these works include clocks, vases, firedogs, wall lights, and mounts for Chinese porcelain and hardstone vases. The exhibition was organized by Charlotte Vignon, Curator of Decorative Arts, The Frick Collection. Based on new art historical and technical research, the exhibition and catalogue promise to transform our understanding of one of the greatest artists of eighteenth-century France.

Between 1916 and 1918, Henry Clay Frick purchased several important pieces of porcelain to decorate his New York mansion. Made at Sèvres, the preeminent eighteenth-century French porcelain manufactory, the objects — including vases, potpourris, jugs and basins, plates, a tea service, and a table—were displayed throughout Frick’s residence.

Depicting quotidian life in the country, urban scenes, and imagined views of timeless Arcadian realms, this selection of rarely exhibited landscape drawings from the Frick’s small but superb collection of works on paper reveals thematic continuities across four centuries. The presentation featured the Frick’s newly acquired View of Dieppe Harbor of 1873 by Antoine Vollon, the generous gift of Dr. Carol Forman Tabler.

A masterpiece of comic fiction, Cervantes’s Don Quixote (fully titled The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha) enjoyed great popularity from the moment it was published, in two volumes, in 1605 and 1615. Reprints and translations spread across Europe, captivating the continental imagination with the escapades of the knight Don Quixote and his companion, Sancho Panza. The novel’s most celebrated episodes inspired a multitude of paintings, prints, and interiors.

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.