2005

The two magnificent carpets on display in the Oval Room beginning May 10 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 (1628–58) and were probably made at the royal factory in Lahore, one of India's main cities for carpet production.

Memling’s Portraits, The Frick Collection’s special fall exhibition, offered the most comprehensive gathering to date of works in this genre by the celebrated Netherlandish artist Hans Memling (c. 1435-1494). Memling’s oeuvre comprises some one hundred paintings, of which thirty are portraits. Executed in Bruges between 1470 and the artist’s death some twenty-five years later, his portraits bear eloquent witness to “Memling’s exasperatingly seamless evolution,” as noted in 1998 by Memling scholar Dirk De Vos.