Future Exhibition

The Frick Collection is pleased to announce that in the fall of 2013, it will be the final venue of an American tour of paintings from the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague.  This prestigious Dutch museum, which has not lent a large body of works from its holdings in nearly thirty years, is undergoing an extensive two-year renovation that makes this opportunity possible.

Between January 2013 and January 2014, the Mauritshuis will send thirty-five paintings to the United States, following two stops at Japanese institutions.  The American exhibition opens next winter at de Young/Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, traveling on to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta for the summer of 2013. 

A smaller selection of fifteen masterpieces will be on view at The Frick Collection in New York from October 22, 2013, through January 19, 2014.  Among the works going on tour are the famous Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer and The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius, neither of which will have been seen by American audiences in ten years.  Emilie Gordenker, Director of the Mauritshuis, comments, “We are delighted to have three excellent museums as partners for our U.S. tour. This agreement allows us to present our collection on both the west and east coasts of the United States, in large as well as more intimate venues.”

The New York presentation will be coordinated by Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator Colin B. Bailey and Assistant Curator Margaret Iacono. Bailey selected the works in conjunction with Edwin Buijsen, Head of Collections at the Mauritshuis. Continuing in the Frick’s tradition of presenting masterpieces from acclaimed museums not easily accessible to the New York public, this exhibition follows four acclaimed shows of similar size that drew, respectively, upon works from the Toledo Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Norton Simon Museum, and Dulwich Picture Gallery. At the Frick’s Mauritshuis exhibition, Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring will have pride of place as the sole work on view in the Oval Room, with the other fourteen paintings being shown together in the large East Gallery. The loans coming to the New York venue are primarily by artists collected by founder Henry Clay Frick, such as Vermeer, Rembrandt, Hals, and van Ruisdael. The selection is complementary, however, in its inclusion of work by Steen and Fabritius and, as well as the addition of two fine still lifes, a genre less well-represented at the Frick.

The fifteen paintings coming to the Frick, all highlights of the Mauritshuis collection, represent the range of subject matter and technique prevalent in seventeenth-century painting in The Netherlands. They are Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, c. 1665; four works by Rembrandt van Rijn (Simeon’s Song of Praise, 1631; “Tronie” of a Man with a Feathered Beret, c. 1635; Susanna, 1636, and Portrait of an Elderly Man, 1667); Frans Hals’s pendant portraits of Jacob Olycan (1596–1638) and Aletta Hanemans (1606–1653), both painted in 1625; Pieter Claesz’s Vanitas Still Life, 1630; Carel Fabritius’s The Goldfinch, 1654; Nicholas Maes’s Old Lacemaker, c. 1655; Gerard ter Borch’s Woman Writing a Letter, c. 1655; Jan Steen’s Girl Eating Oysters, c. 1658–60, and ‘The Way you Hear It, Is the Way You Sing It’, c. 1665; and Jacob van Ruisdael’s View of Haarlem with Bleaching Grounds, c. 1670–75; and Adriaen Coorte’s Still Life with Five Apricots, 1704.

Image: Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), Girl with a Pearl Earring, c. 1665, oil on canvas, 44.5 x 39 cm, Mauritshuis, The Hague