Single Picture Loan Exhibition

In another of its ongoing series of single-picture exhibitions, The Frick Collection presented Raeburn's celebrated skating minister on loan from the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. Completed by Sir Henry Raeburn (1756-1823) around 1784, this image of the Rev. Robert Walker — minister of the Canongate Kirk and an avid member of the Skating Society — is one of the Gallery's most beloved works.

Between 1820 and 1826, John Constable (1776–1837) executed three oil sketches and three finished paintings depicting Salisbury Cathedral from the south side, rising over the green expanse of the bishop's grounds. All are linked to a commission of 1822 from Constable's friend and patron Bishop John Fisher, who asked him to develop one of the sketches into a finished work. Instead, Constable set out afresh, producing a canvas for the bishop that he exhibited to critical acclaim at the Royal Academy in 1823.

In another in a series of single-picture loan exhibitions, The Frick Collection displayed for three months one of the most famous paintings by Édouard Manet (1832-83), The Dead Toreador, on loan from the National Gallery of Art, Washington. It was hung beside the Collection's own Manet oil, The Bullfight. Both paintings were originally part of a larger work, Incident in a Bullfight, exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1864.

On view for the first time in the United States, the celebrated full-length portrait of Madame de Pompadour by the French artist François-Hubert Drouais (1727–75) was presented at New York's Frick Collection. Regarded as one of the greatest and most popular treasures at the National Gallery in London, the portrait was the last one painted of the Marquise de Pompadour, the influential mistress of French King Louis XV.

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.

In this exhibition, Parmigianino’s Antea, a special loan from the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples, was exhibited in the United States for the first time in more than twenty years. Although it is widely recognized as a masterpiece of Italian Renaissance female portraiture, little is known about the painting: its date is not firmly established, it is unclear why or for whom the portrait was painted, and the sitter’s identity is a mystery.