Colin B. Bailey

The Frick Collection presented an exhibition devoted to the art of Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, one of the most original and innovative French artists of the Enlightenment. The fruit of many years’ research by curators on both sides of the Atlantic, the exhibition was the first major Saint-Aubin retrospective in more than eighty years and the first ever to include works from both European and North American collections. It was also the first such collaborative effort between The Frick Collection and the Musée du Louvre, where the show will be on view from February 27 to May 26, 2008.

The Frick Collection presented a selection of five masterpieces of European painting from the highly acclaimed Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California. The exhibition, on view in the Oval Room from February 10 through May 10, 2009, afforded New York and East Coast audiences the occasion to see superb masterworks from the collections of the Norton Simon Art Foundation and The Norton Simon Foundation, a very special opportunity as both institutions generally do not allow their works to travel.

When Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919) was asked whose talents he would most like to possess, he declared: "Rembrandt's." And as the largest individual railway stockholder in the world, Frick is reported to have said that "railways are the Rembrandts of investment." Like Frick, the Dutch art historian Frederik Johannes Lugt (1884–1970) was a great admirer and collector of works by the Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669); as a teenager he wrote a biography of the artist, illustrated with his own copies after Rembrandt's most famous works.