Unprecedented Touring Exhibition of Drawings by Greuze Opens at The Frick Collection in New York, Greuze the Draftsman

This exhibition is the first devoted exclusively to the drawings of Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805), the remarkable French eighteenth-century painter and draftsman. Organized by Edgar Munhall, Curator of The Frick Collection from 1965 to 1999, this unprecedented exhibition brings together at each of its two venues approximately sixty works on paper culled from international collections such as the Musée du Louvre, Paris; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon; the Historisch Museum, Amsterdam; the Albertina, Vienna; the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; The Art Institute of Chicago; and others. Among the many eighteenth-century admirers of Greuze’s work were Catherine the Great and members of the Russian court. Several of her closest advisors and associates purchased drawings from the artist, and an impressive number of them were transferred in 1769 to the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. These works are now in the State Hermitage Museum, and Dr. Munhall has selected roughly twenty fine examples, which have seldom left St. Petersburg, for inclusion in the exhibition.