Colin B. Bailey

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.

In early 2012, The Frick Collection presented an exhibition of nine iconic Impressionist paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, offering the first comprehensive study of the artist's engagement with the full-length format, which was associated with the official Paris Salon in the decade that saw the emergence of a fully fledged Impressionist aesthetic.

In mid eighteenth-century France, elaborately mounted Asian porcelains were at the height of fashion. More Far Eastern porcelains with gilt bronze mounts were produced in the period between 1740 and 1760 than at any other point in European history, and Paris was the center of this phenomenon. Commissioned by the Parisian marchands merciers, or luxury merchants, artisans produced exquisite gilt bronze confections to adorn imported porcelains and often modified the porcelains themselves in order to adapt them to the décor of French interiors.

During the spring and summer of 2005, The Frick Collection presented a selection of approximately seventy drawings from the Schlossmuseum and the Goethe-Nationalmuseum in Weimar, Germany, offering visitors a unique opportunity to view many works that have never before been exhibited outside the former Eastern bloc countries.