A Brush with Nature: The Gere Collection of Landscape Oil Sketches
September 12 through November 12, 2000
This exhibition consisted of approximately sixty landscape oil sketches from the collection of the art historians John and Charlotte Gere. Dating from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, these small, rapidly-executed sketches on paper, panel, or canvas were painted outdoors by artists across Europe to sharpen their skills of perception and execution; they were rarely intended for public exhibition. Pioneers in the collecting of oil sketches — which have only lately gained wide appreciation — the Geres assembled some eighty works over a period of forty years beginning in the 1950s. The selection presents a survey of the oil-sketch tradition as practiced by British, French, Italian, Belgian, Spanish, and Scandinavian artists, many of whom worked in or around Rome, where the practice of open-air sketching flourished. Works by such painters as Corot, Degas, Valenciennes, de Nittis, Simon Denis, Thomas Jones, and Lord Leighton are included, as well as some by artists as yet unidentified. The exhibition represents a milestone in the study and understanding of a vital tradition in European painting. Organized by Christopher Riopelle for the National Gallery, London, where it was first shown, the exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue by Riopelle and Xavier Bray, with an essay by Charlotte Gere.
Michelangelo to Picasso: Master Drawings from the Collection of the Albertina, Vienna
April 18 through June 18, 2000
This major spring exhibition featured masterpieces on paper selected to demonstrate not only the superb holdings of this illustrious Austrian institution, but to chronicle the major assets acquired during the tenure of each of its directors. Works by Rembrandt and Dürer were featured as well as twentieth-century masters acquired by the present regime.
Presentation of this exhibition us made possible, in part, through the generosity of the Fellows of The Frick Collection.
Henry Clay Frick as a Collector of Drawings
December 14, 1999 through January 30, 2000
Marking the 150th Anniversary of the birthday of founder Henry Clay Frick (1849 - 1919), this small exhibition drew attention to a lesser-known aspect of the broad collecting interests of the museum’s founder. Ten drawings that Mr. Frick acquired between 1913 and 1916 — including examples in various media by Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, Thomas Gainsborough, Daniel Gardner, and James McNeill Whistler — were on view in the Cabinet Gallery in the museum’s first floor, along with related documents and photographs. Though Mr. Frick purchased sketches since he was a young man, these are the only drawings that he bequeathed to the public as an integral part of his collection, and this presentation offered an unusual opportunity to consider the eye of this great collector with respect to the drawings he studiously added to his magnificent holdings.
Velázquez in New York Museums
November 16, 1999 through January 30, 2000
To mark the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599–1660), The Frick Collection brought together for the first time six of the Spanish master’s portraits belonging to public collections in New York. They comprised three works lent by The Hispanic Society of America — Gaspar de Guzman, Count-Duke of Olivares, Portrait of a Little Girl, and Camillo Astalli, Known as Cardinal Pamphili; portraits of Juan de Pareja and the Infanta Maria Teresa of Spain lent by the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and The Frick Collection’s own portrait of King Philip IV of Spain. Organized jointly by The Frick Collection and The Hispanic Society of America, the exhibition demonstrated the variety and power of the Spanish master’s work over a lifetime.
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