French and English Drawings of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries from the National Gallery of Canada
February 9 through April 25, 1999
This exhibition of sixty-seven drawings from the collection of the National Gallery of Canada was organized by that museum in collaboration with The Frick Collection. It offered a rich sampling of the treasures assembled by the Department of Prints and Drawings since its founding in 1921, including works by Boucher and Degas acquired only last year. On the English side, artists represented include Bonington, Constable, Flaxman, Hogarth, Palmer, and Turner; among the French artists are Courbet, David, Delacroix, Fragonard, Greuze, Redon, and Watteau. Most of these works were exhibited for the first time in New York. An illustrated brochure containing an essay by Richard Hemphill, Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Canada, was also available.
Drouais’ Portrait of Madame de Pompadour from The National Gallery, London
January 26 through May 13, 1999
On view for the first time in the United States, the celebrated full-length portrait of Madame de Pompadour by the French artist François-Hubert Drouais (1727–1775) was presented at New York’s Frick Collection. Regarded as one of the greatest and most popular treasures at the National Gallery in London, the portrait was the last one painted of the Marquise de Pompadour, the influential mistress of French King Louis XV. Part of a critically acclaimed series of single-loan exhibitions (following the display of a landscape by Claude Monet last summer), this presentation featured several complementary paintings by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779), Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805), and Jean-Marc Nattier (1685–1766) from the Frick’s own holdings. Decorative artworks on view in conjunction with the portrait included furniture and porcelain of noted French manufacture.
Further, the presentation of the Drouais portrait has as a backdrop, in a loose sense, other French masterpieces of the period that are installed in galleries throughout the mansion, such as panels by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) and François Boucher (1703–1770). Indeed, with such celebrated works in its holdings, many in connection with her life and interests, The Frick Collection has long felt the presence of Madame de Pompadour. Through the single-loan presentation and two free lectures this winter, the Frick offers its visitors a glimpse of her legacy and role as a patron of the arts. Edgar Munhall, Curator of The Frick Collection, has organized this presentation and has authored a color-illustrated educational brochure.
The presentation was made possible, in part, through the generosity of the Fellows of The Frick Collection.
The Medieval Housebook: A View of Fifteenth-Century Life
May 18 through July 25, 1999
The Medieval Housebook, a compendium of secular texts accompanied by full-page pen-and-ink illustrations, many of them enhanced with color, presented a remarkable view of life in a princely court at the end of the late Middle Ages. The book, which has been in the family of the counts of Waldburg Wolfegg since the end of the seventeenth century, was temporarily disbound for the creation of a facsimile edition, providing a unique opportunity to display the individual sheets. A wide range of subjects is represented in the illustrations, from personifications of the planets to a Garden of Love and on to fishing expeditions, mining operations, and a siege encampment. The manuscript pages were supplemented by twenty-four drypoint etchings by the Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet, the artist believed to be responsible for several of the illustrated pages in the Housebook, as well as prints by contemporary masters, related manuscripts, and examples of stained glass.
The exhibition was organized for The Frick Collection by Timothy B. Husband, Curator, Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art, who also wrote the accompanying illustrated booklet. A previously published catalogue by Christoph Graf zu Waldburg Wolfegg was also available.
Manet's The Dead Toreador and The Bullfight: Fragments of a Lost Salon Painting Reunited
May 25 through August 29, 1999
In another in a series of single-picture loan exhibitions, The Frick Collection displayed for three months one of the most famous paintings by Édouard Manet (1832-83), The Dead Toreador, on loan from the National Gallery of Art, Washington. It was hung beside the Collection’s own Manet oil The Bullfight. Both paintings were originally part of a larger work, Incident in a Bullfight, exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1864. Perhaps in reaction to harsh criticism by the press, or in order to create two stronger works, Manet cut out two large sections of the Incident and developed them into independent paintings, discarding the rest of the canvas. He made no record of the appearance of the Salon painting, but caricatures of the period and X-radiographs provide clues to the original composition. This reunion of the fragments — the first since they left Manet’s studio — afforded an opportunity to examine each of them in the context of the lost Salon painting. It sheds light as well on Manet’s unusual working methods. Organized by Susan Grace Galassi, Associate Curator at The Frick Collection, the exhibition was accompanied by an illustrated brochure and a display of books.
Watteau and His World: French Drawing from 1700 to 1750
October 20, 1999 through January 9, 2000
This comprehensive survey of drawings by Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) and some of his leading contemporaries included more than sixty-five drawings lent from public and private collections in North America. A core of some thirty-five drawings by Watteau himself demonstated the evolution and range of his graphic art, with examples of all the signficant subjects that he drew and all the genres and graphic media in which he worked. Other sections of the exhibition were devoted to his artistic forebears, to his contemporary followers, and to a group of later artists indebted to the example of his work. Among those represented were Boucher, Gillot, Lancret, Lemoyne, Liotard, Natoire, Oudry, Pater, and Portail. Alan Wintermute selected the works and wrote the accompanying catalogue. The exhibition was organized by the American Federation of Arts.
This exhibition was made possible in part by the Florence Gould Foundation. The catalogue was supported in part by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral: Two Versions Reunited
September 21 through December 31, 1999
Between 1820 and 1826, John Constable (1776–1837) executed three oil sketches and three finished paintings depicting Salisbury Cathedral from the south side, rising over the green expanse of the bishop’s grounds. All are linked to a commission of 1822 from Constable’s friend and patron Bishop John Fisher, who asked him to develop one of the sketches into a finished work. Instead, Constable set out afresh, producing a canvas for the bishop that he exhibited to critical acclaim at the Royal Academy in 1823. The bishop, however, was troubled by a storm cloud around the cathedral’s spire, and a year later he asked Constable for alterations.
Working from an outline of the 1823 canvas, Constable completed the commission with The Frick Collection’s painting of 1826, in addition to a full-scale oil sketch now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The reuniting of these two canvases, made possible by a generous loan from the Metropolitan Museum, allowed the viewer to examine Constable’s painstaking method of working out the required changes in composition and atmosphere in a nearly finished study, and to observe the subtle differences between study and finished canvas. They were shown together in the Library. Unfortunately, the bishop, who died in 1825, did not live to see the Frick painting, with its more serene sky, completed.
For more information and details, see the related press release. |
