Major donation to the Frick Collection: museum gains works by Europe's greatest artists

The Frick Collection in New York has acquired drawings and pastels by celebrated artists such as Degas, Caillebotte, Fragonard, Goya, and many others in its collections, thanks to the largest and most important donation in its history by Elizabeth “Betty” and Jean-Marie Eveillard.

Over the past forty-five years, the Eveillards have assembled an extraordinary collection of European works on paper, encompassing nearly five centuries, from the late 15th century to the 20th century, by artists active in France, Britain, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. they donated twenty-six of these works to the Frick Collection, including eighteen drawings, five pastels, two prints, and one oil sketch. Along with preparatory sketches, studies, and freestanding portraits, there are also two landscape scenes. Among the artists in the donated works are François Boucher, Edgar Degas, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Thomas Lawrence, and Jean-François Millet, as well as artists not yet in the museum’s collections, such as Gustave Caillebotte, Maurice Quentin de La Tour, Jan Lievens, John Singer Sargent, and Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun.

These works will be presented at Frick Madison’s temporary home in an exhibition planned for fall 2022.

“Each of the twenty-six works,” commented Xavier F. Salomon, assistant director of Frick, “augments our holdings of an artist familiar to us or an artist who was not yet represented within our collections. By adding five pastels and an oil sketch, the donation also adds works of these techniques. We look forward to sharing these works with the public next year.”

One of the museum’s strengths is 18th-century French art, with works by Boucher, Fragonard, Greuze and Watteau. The donation brings works in plaster and pastel on paper by these four artists to the museum. Other donated works enrich the Frick’s celebrated collection of Italian works, such as a rare drawing by an anonymous 15th-century Venetian and Italian Renaissance and Baroque drawings by artists such as Federico Barocci, Guido Reni, and Salvator Rosa, and 18th-century works by Giovanni Battista Piazzetta and Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo.

Image: Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Head of a Woman, detail (1784; pastel on paper). Gift from the Collection of Elizabeth and Jean-Marie Eveillard. Photo by Joseph Coscia Jr.

Major donation to the Frick Collection: museum gains works by Europe's greatest artists

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