Past

Of the many artists who flourished in Rome during the eighteenth century, the silversmith Luigi Valadier (1726–1785) was particularly admired by popes, royalty, and aristocrats across Europe. Luigi Valadier: Splendor in Eighteenth-Century Rome, curated by Alvar González-Palacios, brought together more than sixty extraordinary works by the renowned silversmith in celebration of his unsurpassed technical expertise and avant-garde aesthetic.

The exhibition in the Portico Gallery presented a promised gift to The Frick Collection: seventy-five objects from the collection of Sidney R. Knafel — the finest collection of French faience in private hands — to tell the fascinating and complex history of this particular art form.

For the first time in twenty-four years and only the second time in their history, two masterpieces of early Netherlandish painting commissioned by the Carthusian monk Jan Vos were reunited. These works, The Frick Collection’s Virgin and Child with St. Barbara, St. Elizabeth, and Jan Vos, commissioned from Jan van Eyck and The Virgin and Child with St. Barbara and Jan Vos, painted by Petrus Christus, were shown with a selection of objects that place them in the rich monastic context for which they were created. 

Canova’s George Washington examined the history of acclaimed sculptor Antonio Canova's lost masterpiece, a full-length statue of George Washington depicted in ancient Roman garb, drafting his farewell address to the states. The exhibition brings together Canova’s full-sized preparatory plaster model (which had never left Italy), four preparatory sketches for the sculpture, and related engravings and drawings, as well as Thomas Lawrence’s 1816 oil portrait of Canova, which, like the model and several sketches, was on loan from the Gypsotheca e Museo Antonio Canova in Possagno, Italy, the birthplace of the artist.

In collaboration with the Meadows Museum, Dallas, and the Auckland Castle Trust, County Durham, England, The Frick Collection co-organized an exhibition of Jacob and His Twelve Sons, an ambitious series of thirteen life-size paintings that depict the Old Testament figures. On loan from Auckland Castle, the works by the Spanish Golden Age master Francisco de Zurbarán had never traveled to the United States before they were presented at the Meadows Museum in the fall of 2017.

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo was one of the finest painters of the Spanish Golden Age; this exhibition brought together the only two known self-portraits by him, one in The Frick Collection, and one in the National Gallery, London, along with a small selection of additional works by the artist.

The Frick Collection presented Veronese in Murano: Two Venetian Renaissance Masterpieces Restored, a focused exhibition, organized by Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator Xavier F. Salomon, on two recently conserved and rarely seen paintings by the celebrated artist Paolo Veronese (1528–1588), St. Jerome in the Wilderness and St. Agatha Visited in Prison by St. Peter. While the paintings are known to scholars, their remote location in a church in Murano, an island in the lagoon of Venice, has made them difficult to study. The exhibition provided a unique opportunity for an international audience to discover these two masterpieces in New York.

This year-long installation in the Portico Gallery was inspired by the generous gift of fourteen pieces of Du Paquier porcelain given to the Frick in 2016 by Paul Sullivan and Trustee Melinda Martin Sullivan. Although in operation for only twenty-five years, the Du Paquier manufactory left an impressive body of inventive and often whimsical work, forging a distinct identity in the history of European porcelain production. The exhibition featured about forty tureens, drinking vessels, platters, and other objects produced by Du Paquier between 1720 and 1740.

On loan from a private collection, Rembrandt's Abraham Entertaining the Angels of 1646 was the centerpiece of a small exhibition dedicated to the artist's depictions of Abraham and his various encounters with God and his angels, as recounted in the book of Genesis. In the painting and in the other works included in the show — a tightly focused selection of prints and drawings and a single copper plate — Rembrandt explored, in different media, the nature of divine presence and the ways it was perceived.

Celebrating the largest acquisition in the Frick’s history, a gift of approximately 450 portrait medals from the incomparable collection of Stephen K. and Janie Woo Scher, the exhibition explored one of the most important artistic inventions of the Renaissance. The selection showcased superlative examples by masters of the medium — many of whom were also celebrated painters, sculptors, and printmakers — from Pisanello in the Italian Renaissance to Pierre-Jean David d’Angers in nineteenth-century France, honoring medals as integral to the history of portraiture in Western art and as a triumph of sculpture on a small scale.