Xavier F. Salomon

In this week’s episode of Cocktails with a Curator, Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator Xavier F. Salomon explores Piero della Francesca’s St. John the Evangelist, one of the few major works by the Renaissance artist in the United States. This striking panel was originally part of a polyptych commissioned for the high altar of Sant’Agostino in Piero’s hometown of Borgo San Sepolcro. The polyptych was probably dismembered in the mid-16th century, less than one hundred years after it was made, and many fragments are now lost.

In this week’s episode of Cocktails with a Curator, journey to sixteenth-century Rome with Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator Xavier F. Salomon as he discusses El Greco’s Vincenzo Anastagi, one of three important paintings by the Renaissance artist in the Frick’s collection. Born in Crete, El Greco spent a formative seven years in Rome, where he painted this rare, full-length portrait of a minor aristocrat from Perugia then serving as Sergeant Major of Castel Sant’Angelo.

In this week’s episode of Cocktails with a Curator, take a closer look at the extraordinary flickers of paint in the colorful canvases of François Boucher’s Four Seasons series with Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator Xavier F. Salomon. Acquired by Henry Clay Frick late in life, the four paintings were commissioned by Boucher’s great patron Madame de Pompadour—the longtime mistress of King Louis XV—to be placed over doors, hence their unusual shape. The complementary cocktail this week is the Time Regained.

This week’s episode of Cocktails with a Curator is a story of creation and destruction. Join Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator Xavier F. Salomon as he examines two pieces of the legendary Meissen Swan Service, which was all but destroyed during World War II when Russian soldiers ransacked a palace in the Polish village of Brody. This opulent set of dishes was given by Augustus III, King of Poland, to the statesman Heinrich von Brühl, who helped engineer Augustus’s ascent to the throne in 1734.

In this week’s episode of Cocktails with a Curator, celebrate the Yuletide with Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator Xavier F.

In this week’s episode of Cocktails with a Curator, toast the new year with Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator Xavier F. Salomon as he examines a masterpiece of both sculpture and clockmaking: The Dance of Time, by Clodion (Claude Michel) and Jean-Baptiste Lepaute. In this 18th-century timepiece, three terracotta nymphs or Hours dance in a circle around an exquisite mechanism enclosed in a glass globe.

In this week’s episode of Cocktails with a Curator, Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator Xavier F. Salomon considers the fragility of art in the context of the Frick’s Perseus and Andromeda by Giambattista Tiepolo. This depiction of the Greek demigod saving Andromeda from a sea-monster is a preparatory sketch for a series of ceiling frescoes at Palazzo Archinto in Milan that were destroyed during an Allied bombing in 1943.