Susan Grace Galassi

From November 5, 2014, through February 1, 2015, the Frick presented ten masterpieces of painting from the Scottish National Gallery. The museum, one of the finest in the world, is distinguished for its holdings of works by the greatest masters of Western art and for its comprehensive collection of Scottish art. The exhibition featured paintings from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries that invite illuminating comparisons to the Frick's permanent collection.

In 1965 Childs Frick, son of Henry Clay Frick, left by bequest 220 pieces of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain that he and his wife had purchased over many years. They had chosen the pieces as birthday and Christmas presents and displayed them in thier home in Roslyn, Long Island. A selection later decorated the offices and upstairs staff rooms of the Collection. In the autumn of 1992, for the first time, a large number of pieces were placed on permanent display in the Reception Hall, in specially designed new cases.

An exhibition of approximately one hundred works by John Constable (1776–1837) was devoted to his primary interest, landscape. The assembled group, spanning the artist's entire career, came from a private collection; virtually none of the works had been previously shown in this country.

On loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Joseph Mallord William Turner's Mortlake Terrace, Summer’s Evening of 1827 hung for six months beside its companion piece, The Frick Collection's Mortlake Terrace: Early Summer Morning, executed a year earlier. Both were painted for William Moffatt and depict The Limes, Moffatt's home overlooking the Thames at Mortlake, near Kew Gardens to the west of central London.

This exhibition presented a selection of nineteenth-century French drawings and prints from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Sheets by Millet, Courbet, Degas, Manet, Pissarro, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, and other masters are on view. Ranging widely in subject matter and technique and spanning the entire second half of the nineteenth century, these works represent the diverse interests of Realist, Impressionist, and Post-Impressionist artists in a rapidly changing world.

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) painted his Portrait of a Peasant (Patience Escalier) in August 1888 during a highly productive fifteen-month stay in Arles in southern France. The opportunity to display this work in New York was the result of a special exchange program between the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, and The Frick Collection and marked the first time in forty years that the painting had left its home institution.

The Frick Collection celebrated the generosity and discerning taste of former Director Charles A. Ryskamp (1928–2010) with an exhibition of works on paper from his bequest. Dr. Ryskamp's generous gift transformed the museum's holdings in drawings, enlarging them by nearly a third, while complementing the permanent collection's focus on the landscape and figural subjects favored by Henry Clay Frick. The works were exhibited for the first time at the Frick in the Cabinet, a space created by Dr. Ryskamp during his tenure as director from 1987 to 1997 and intended especially for the display of works on paper.

Goya’s understated portrait of the woman known as María Martínez de Puga, acquired by Henry Clay Frick in 1914, was the inspiration for The Frick Collection’s special exhibition Goya’s Last Works. It was the first show in the United States to concentrate exclusively on the final phase of Goya’s long career — the years of the artist’s voluntary exile in Bordeaux from 1824 to 1828. Fifty-one examples of Goya’s final production were borrowed from public and private European and North American collections.

The eighteenth-century Venetian painter and draftsman Domenico Tiepolo is best known for his drawn narrative cycles of thecommedia dell’ arte character Punchinello and engaging scenes of everyday life in the Veneto. He reserved his greatest passion, however, for sacred subjects.

When is a work of art complete? And when do further additions detract from the desired result? These questions lie at the heart of aesthetic theory and have preoccupied artists, critics, and collectors for centuries. The problem of "finish" is particularly relevant in the graphic arts, in which images are developed in stages and often distributed at various points in their making.