1992

Vincent van Gogh's luminous landscape, Flowering Garden, executed by the artist at Arles in the summer of 1888, was placed on loan by a private foundation for a two-year period. Flowering Garden is a large vertical canvas depicting the flat expanse of a field of flowers, framed on the right by the wall of a farmhouse and trees, and at the high horizon by a line of low farm buildings with red-tiled roofs.

The first exhibition devoted entirely to the work of this long-neglected French Rococo master who during his lifetime was one of Europe’s most celebrated artists. The prolific Lancret was a favorite of Louis XV and Frederick the Great as well as of international nobility, but during the nineteenth century he fell under the shadow of his mentor Antoine Watteau. Lancret in fact had a singular and brilliant talent of his own, as this exhibition demonstrated.

In 1965 Childs Frick, son of Henry Clay Frick, left by bequest 220 pieces of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain that he and his wife had purchased over many years. They had chosen the pieces as birthday and Christmas presents and displayed them in thier home in Roslyn, Long Island. A selection later decorated the offices and upstairs staff rooms of the Collection. In the autumn of 1992, for the first time, a large number of pieces were placed on permanent display in the Reception Hall, in specially designed new cases.

An exhibition composed of watercolors illustrating more than sixty nineteenth-century interiors, from cottages to palaces.  Just as proud owners today might wish to preserve the appearance of their homes on film, polaroid, or video, the householders of the last century frequently engaged artists to record their dwellings.  The works in the exhibition were chosen from two private collections — one American, the other European — which together provided a unique survey of this very special genre of nineteenth-century art.

A focused exhibition placing a Hercules attributed to Antonio del Pollaiuolo in the collection of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin side by side with the Frick's own bronze Hercules attributed to the same artist. Questions of the authorship and dating of both pieces were considered. The Collection also borrowed, for comparison with the bronzes, one painting and several prints and drawings, all by or closely related to Pollaioulo.