A Visit to the Frick Collection

Last Sunday the NYC Urban Sketchers met at the Frick Collection on Fifth Ave and 70th St. It is amazing to think that all the artworks inside belonged to one family. Below is part of the Wikipedia entry about the museum.

The Frick is one of the pre-eminent small art museums in the United States, with a high-quality collection of old master paintings and fine furniture housed in six galleries within the former residence. Frick had intended the mansion to eventually become a museum. Many of the paintings are still arranged according to Frick's design. Besides its permanent collection, the Frick has always organized small, focused temporary exhibitions.^[6]

The collection features some of the best-known paintings by major European artists, as well as numerous works of sculpture and porcelain. It also has 18th century French furniture, Limoges enamel, and Oriental rugs.^[1] After Frick's death, his daughter, Helen Clay Frick, expanded the collection, with a third of its artworks acquired since 1919. Although the museum cannot lend the two-thirds that belonged to Frick, as stipulated in his will, the Frick Collection does lend artworks and objects acquired since his death.^[6]

Included in the collection are Jean-Honoré Fragonard's masterpiece The Progress of Love, three paintings by Johannes Vermeer including Mistress and Maid, two paintings by Jacob van Ruisdael including Quay at Amsterdam,^[7] and Piero della Francesca's St. John the Evangelist.

My favorite spot was the Garden Court where I could easily sit for hours. It is beautiful and peaceful.

Tucked away in other rooms and alcoves were sculptures, paintings, furniture and accessories...all of them lovely.

One room had enormous paintings and portraits as well as a few tables with sculptures.

You can see that I worked in watercolors and ink. I was almost finished with this sketch when one of the guards came over to me and my friend to tell us that we could only use pencil...no color at all, not even colored pencil. It struck me funny because I had been painting and sketching at that point for nearly 4 hours and a good part of the time that I was sketching the alcove above this sketch, another guard had been watching me paint and hadn't said a word about it. Later in the day when we were sharing our sketches someone who that same guard approached about "no color" was told that the guard's boss was making his rounds so they were speaking to all the artists to warn them.