1998

This exhibition presented drawings from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries that displayed several modes of depicting figures. Some were drawings of figures or costumes copied from life and intended as preparatory studies for painted compositions. Others were individual or grouped figures that spring from the artist's imagination or are based on his observation of the world around him. Whether compositional studies or finished works of art, all the drawings focused on the figure as a means of exploring form, narrative, or individual spirit.

Critically and commercially popular during the nineteenth century,  the intriguing and distinctly British genre of Victorian fairy painting was the subject of an exhibition at The Frick Collection. The roughly thirty paintings and works on paper were selected by Edgar Munhall, Curator of The Frick Collection, from a comprehensive touring exhibition — the first of its type for this subject. The original exhibition was organized by the University of Iowa Museum of Art and the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Continuing its series of single-picture loan exhibitions, The Frick Collection had on display for two months Claude Monet's Vétheuil in Summer from the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, hanging near the Collection's own Monet oil Vétheuil in Winter. The juxtaposition in the North Hall of these two contemporary works depicting the same site viewed from across the Seine in summer and in winter followed the highly successful run of the exhibition "Monet at Vétheuil" presented earlier this year at the University of Michigan Museum of Art and elsewhere.

The age of Goethe, Beethoven, and Kant was also a brilliant period for the visual arts in Germany. This exhibition — culled from the holdings of the Winterstein family of Munich, the world's most comprehensive and important private collection of German drawings and watercolors of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — afforded viewers an opportunity to study fine works by forty-nine artists from the greatest period of German drawing.

Sixty-six drawings and watercolors by the renowned eighteenth-century architect Robert Adam, his brother and partner James, and artists employed in their office were on view at The Frick Collection from December 16, 1997, through April 5, 1998. The works were selected from the 9,000 Adam drawings acquired by Sir John Soane in 1833, virtually all of the surviving sheets that were kept by Robert and James Adam themselves.

With extraordinary generosity, the Musée du Louvre loaned one of the most celebrated icons of French art: Nicolas Poussin's The Arcadian Shepherds. This image of four shepherds solemnly meditating over the inscription they have discovered on a tomb — Et in Arcadia Ego (“Even in Arcadia [there] am I”) — has come to be regarded as the quintessence of the art of Poussin (1594-1665).