Draw Me a Story:

A Century of Children's Book Illustration

February 11–May 20, 2012

This exhibition provides an appealing survey of drawing styles and techniques from Randolph Caldecott in the 19th century to Chris van Allsburg in the 20th—with many delightful and familiar artists in between including Ernest Shepard, Maurice Sendak, Tomi diPaolo, and Jules Feiffer.  The 40 works on paper by famed illustrators are supplemented by 13 books.

Draw Me a Story will be staged with artworks hung slightly lower than usual, step stools available, and reading nooks in the galleries for visitors young and old.  The illustrations span one hundred years and include detailed watercolors, expressive pen drawings, and experimental combinations of media. Viewers will get a sense of how an artist’s vision can tell a story with a single image or bring a familiar story to life in a new way. 

This family-friendly exhibition will be complemented by Childhood at Clayton, an adjacent exhibition drawn from the Frick’s permanent collection related to childhood at Clayton—books, toys, games, clothing, and period photographs will focus on the play time, work time, and reading interests of the Frick children, Childs and Helen, while connecting their experience to larger cultural shifts—like new attitudes towards child development, the importance of education, and the emphasis on play as important to a child’s growth.

Draw Me a Story: A Century of Children’s Book Illustrations is a program of ExhibitsUSA, a national division of Mid-America Arts Alliance and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Support for the Pittsburgh presentation is provided by Eat'n Park Restaurants.

Kate Greenaway (English, 1846–1901), Hush-a-Bye, Baby from the book The April Baby’s Book of Tunes, 1900. Watercolor on paper. Collection: Cartoon Art Museum, San Francisco, CA

Three Centuries of Printmaking featuring The Prints of Jacques Callot and two complementary exhibitions drawn from mezzotints and chromolithographs in the Frick’s Permanent Collection

June 16–September 2, 2012

This summer the Frick galleries will feature The Prints of Jacques Callot comprised of 35 etchings made by seventeenth-century master Jacques Callot (1592–1635) who revolutionized printmaking. One of the first artists to gain fame exclusively through prints, Callot made over 1400 prints in his relatively short career. His work reflect the mannerist elegance of the late Renaissance moving into the theatricality of the Baroque. Marked by keen wit, incisive observations, and social criticism, his prints have been hugely influential on succeeding generations of artists, including Goya, whose Disasters of War is indebted to Callot’s series of prints Miseries of War. This traveling exhibition on loan from the Reading Public Museum features a selection of Callot’s prints depicting landscapes, noble ladies, beggars, theater scenes, religious images, military, and war scenes.

The Prints of Jacques Callot will be presented in conjunction with two complementary exhibitions assembled from the Frick’s permanent collection of eighteenth-century mezzotints and nineteenth-century prints. A selection of fine eighteenth-century English mezzotints purchased by Henry Clay Frick in the early twentieth century will be combined with English portraiture in the collection for a fascinating and gossipy look at who-was-who in eighteenth-century England. The Frick’s complete folio Picturesque Architecture in Paris, Ghent, Antwerp, Rouen, and Drawn from Nature on Stone by Thomas Shotter Boys will be exhibited together for the first time in 20 years.  These 29 chromolithographs by Thomas Shotter Boys (1803-1874) are technically brilliant, full of charming detail, and give a glimpse into the sights tourists of the early nineteenth century would have admired whether traveling, or leafing through Boys’ groundbreaking publication.

Together these three exhibitions span over two hundred years and provide a look at three different centuries as observed by artists working in different forms and for different purposes, yet all illustrating the importance of the printmaker in observing, recording, publishing and disseminating a distinct view of the world.

Impressions of Interiors:
Gilded Age Paintings by Walter Gay
October 5, 2012–January 6, 2013

American artist Walter Gay (1856–1937) specialized in painting views of opulent residential interiors in late-19th and early-20th-century America and Europe. John Singer Sargent, Gay’s nearly exact contemporary, is well known for painting the sumptuous clothing and jewels of American society in his fashionable portraits. Walter Gay, in contrast, painted society’s rooms—with their silk wall coverings, ornate paneling, 18th-century French furniture, tapestries, and sculptures—arranged in the private spaces of what were often legendary residences.

Impressions of Interiors: Gilded Age Paintings by Walter Gay will present a comprehensive exploration of Walter Gay’s depictions of elaborately decorated, European and American domestic interiors, painted from the mid-1890s to the early 1930s. These paintings serve as documents of the collecting, decorating habits, and taste of Gay and his patrons, and also as mirrors of their attitudes towards the past. Helen Clay Frick, like many of her contemporaries, sought out Walter Gay to record the “spirit” of the spaces in what was then her family home, now The Frick Collection. The three resulting paintings are part of the collection at the Frick Art & Historical Center, and provide the inspiration and foundation for this reexamination of Walter Gay’s work.

Organized by the Frick Art & Historical Center.

This exhibition was made possible by a generous grant from
The Richard C. von Hess Foundation.