Current Exhibitions
The Road to Impressionism:
Barbizon Landscapes from the Walters Art Museum
Through May 24, 2009
The Frick Art Museum
The Frick Art Museum is pleased to present The Road to Impressionism: Barbizon Landscapes from the Walters Art Museum, an exhibition of 32 paintings that includes works by all of the major Barbizon figures, as well as examples by Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley, the Impressionist painters most deeply influenced by them. The exhibition provides visitors with the opportunity to celebrate spring at the Frick by enjoying these wonderful representations of nature. Nineteenth-century France was a hotbed of new ideas, political movements, scientific discoveries, and creative activity. Important movements in the history of art reflected this ferment, and the Barbizon movement—named for the small village near the Forest of Fontainebleau where the artists worked—was in the middle of it, both chronologically and stylistically. The work of the Barbizon school dovetails with most of the major artistic movements of mid-19th-century France, with the intensely expressive trees of Diaz and Rousseau conveying the Romantic approach of earlier in the century, and Millet’s interest in the life of the rural laborer becoming a powerful force in the rise of Realism. |
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These artistic movements ultimately led to Impressionism in the last third of the nineteenth century, perhaps France’s most enduring artistic legacy. More
A suggested donation of $5.00 will be requested for this extraordinary exhibition. Members free.
Millet drawings from the Frick’s permanent collection complement works
in The Road to Impressionism; on view through May 24
To complement the works on view in The Road to Impressionism, the Frick’s entire collection of drawings by Jean-François Millet (1814-1875) will be on view through May 24 in the exhibition A Devotion to Work: Barbizon Drawings by Jean-François Millet. These works provide a compact survey of many of Millet’s most enduring themes and pictorial techniques.
The drawings will be organized chronologically, allowing for works from the 1840s and 1850s to provide an introduction to Millet’s interest in rural life, his humanist impulse towards dignifying the work of agricultural laborers, and his scenes of domestic interiors—indebted to Dutch genre painting, and his own daily experience raising nine children in a village cottage.
Later works, from the 1860s show his technical skill, his fine sense of touch, and an interest in spontaneous, evocative color, reminiscent of the young Impressionists, as he made intimate, poetic works for collectors like Emile Gavet, who at one point owned 95 of the artist’s pastels. More
Exhibition-Related Programs
View a list of exhibition-related tours, programs and more.
Download a printable schedule of exhibition-related tours, programs
and more.
Special! Get a Discount on an Art and Culture in the Gilded Age Tour
All visitors to these exhibition will receive a coupon for a $2.00 discount on an Art and Culture in the Gilded Age tour of Clayton. Reservations are recommended for the tour. Please call 412-371-0600 to schedule.
Meissonier: A Final Masterpiece, A Pittsburgh Home
Through May 31, 2009
The Frick Art Museum
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1806, Jena, a significant late-nineteenth-century painting by French artist Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier (1815–1891), is on view at The Frick Art Museum through May 31, 2009. The painting, acquired by Pittsburgh industrialist Charles Lockhart in 1896, was generously donated to the Frick in 2007 by the Richard D. Edwards Family.
Featured in the 1997 Frick-organized exhibition Collecting in the Gilded Age: Art Patronage in Pittsburgh, 1890–1910, 1806 Jena was a significant “rediscovery” by the curatorial team.
Although the work has an over one-hundred-year history in Pittsburgh, for much of that time its presence was unknown to art historians, who lost track of the painting shortly after it was exhibited in the first Carnegie Annual.
1806, Jena is one of five major canvases Meissonier envisioned illustrating Napoleon I and his armies at war. Other finished examples include 1814, The Campaign of France (Musée
d’Orsay, Paris) and 1807, Friedland, which caused a media sensation when it entered the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1887 as a gift from Judge Henry Hilton.Prints made after these works are included in the current exhibition.
Since arriving at the Frick, 1806, Jena has undergone extensive conservation treatment to restore it to its full glory. Restoration efforts have revealed the work’s original vibrant colors and
greatly enhanced the appearance of fine detail. The painting’s gilded frame has also been restored. The current exhibition marks the first public exhibition of the artwork since the completion of its conservation.
In addition to 1806, Jena, the exhibition Meissonier: A Final Masterpiece, A Pittsburgh Home includes three prints made after Meissonier’s Napoleonic canvases, from the two-volume set Oeuvres Complètes de E. Meissonier, as well as supplemental archival photography of the Lockhart mansion and informational text panels.
The exhibition Meissonier: A Final Masterpiece, A Pittsburgh Home is on view at The Frick Art Museum through May 31, 2009. Admission to The Frick Art Museum is free. |
Through May 3, 2009
Car and Carriage Museum
When Henry Ford unveiled the Model T in 1908, few could have anticipated the incredible 19-year production run that awaited the vehicle. Simply put, the car was a revolution on wheels. More than 15 million Model Ts were sold worldwide, placing it among the top-selling automobile models of all time. A Revolution on Wheels: The Model T at 100 celebrates the T’s birthday with an exhibition of five examples of the Model T, representing a variety of body styles from 1909 to 1926. The Frick has borrowed four models to supplement the 1914 Model T Touring car already in our collection. They include a 1909 Model T Touring Car, a 1917 Model T Runabout, a 1925 Model T "Depot Hack," and a 1926 Model T Coupe. All were built by the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, Michigan, with the customized body of the "Depot Hack" manufactured by the Calumet Truck Body Corporation in Calumet. Michigan.
Model T Jubilee - April 18 and 19
Plan to attend the Model T Jubilee Family Fun Days at the Frick on Saturday, April 18 and Sunday, April 19. The weekend will include tours, activities and a Sunday afternoon lecture by WQED-TV's Rick Sebak, who will discuss his recent PBS program A Ride Alomg the Lincoln Highway.
