Denise Allen

Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741–1828) and Claude Michel, called Clodion (1738–1814), were two of the foremost sculptors in France during the late eighteenth century, and the Frick housed an important group of their works. In 1915 founder Henry Clay Frick acquired Clodion’s terracotta Zephyrus and Flora and, the following year, Houdon’s marble bust of the Comtesse du Cayla. Other works that were subsequently added to the collection were shown together for the first time, highlighting the artists’ expressive ranges, as well as their defining contributions to the sculpture of Enlightenment-era France. MORE »

The Frick Collection was the only venue for the first public exhibition of this private collection devoted to the bronze figurative statuette. The nearly forty sculptures included in the show were of exceptional quality and span the fifteenth through the eighteenth century, exemplifying the genre from its beginnings in Renaissance Italy to its dissemination across the artistic centers of Europe. The Hill Collection is distinguished by rare, autograph masterpieces by Italian sculptors such as Andrea Riccio, Giambologna, and Giuseppe Piamontini. MORE »

George Stubbs (1724–1806): A Celebration, an exhibition of approximately twenty paintings by the celebrated artist, came in early 2007 to The Frick Collection, its only North American venue. The exhibition marked the bicentenary of Stubbs’s death by presenting some of his greatest contributions to the tradition of British eighteenth-century painting, all notable for their originality and beauty.

Created to delight and engage their audiences over countless viewings, bronze statuettes enjoyed immense popularity with rulers and the wealthy educated classes who collected them between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. The Frick Collection was pleased to have, as its special fall exhibition, European Bronzes from the Quentin Collection, the first public presentation of a distinguished, little-known private collection devoted to the art of these small- and medium-scale sculptures.

This was the first exhibition devoted to Willem van Tetrode, the Northern sculptor who brought the tradition of the classically inspired Italian Renaissance bronze home to the Netherlands. During almost twenty years in Italy, Tetrode studied and restored antique marble sculpture and worked for celebrated artists such as Benvenuto Cellini. From these experiences Tetrode invented expressive small bronzes showing the male nude in poised or violent motion. These heroic nudes transformed the Renaissance bronze statuette into a powerful Northern idiom.

The Frick Collection presented the first monographic exhibition dedicated to Andrea Riccio (1470–1532), one of the most creative sculptors of the Renaissance. On view were thirty-one autograph works representing every phase of Riccio’s career, three bronzes believed to be derived from the artist’s lost compositions, and two life-size terracotta sculptures. Andrea Riccio: Renaissance Master of Bronze was shown exclusively at The Frick Collection.

One of the most familiar and beloved paintings at The Frick Collection, Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert (c. 1480), is also deeply enigmatic. The artist has imagined this medieval saint alone in a stony wilderness, stepping forward from his simple shelter into a golden light that seems to transfigure him spiritually. For centuries, viewers of this masterpiece have puzzled over the meaning of Bellini’s composition and have sought explanations in a variety of pictorial and textual sources.