New York City - For the first time since their arrival at the Frick mansion in 1915, the principal panels of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Progress of Love series can be seen in dramatically different, partly-skylit illumination and outside of their long-standing gallery installation. These monumental works are a major attraction at the museum, and they have been temporarily placed on view in the East Gallery while the Fragonard Room undergoes its first major relighting and refurbishment in seventy-five years. The six panels currently on view in the East Gallery are accompanied by a remarkable set of seating furniture carved by one of the most important chairmakers of the eighteenth century, Nicolas Heurtaut (1720–1771). Not often on view, these four chairs and two canapés still bear their original Beauvais tapestry upholstery, the designs of which are after Oudry and Boucher. On View through 16 September, 2007.

The frames and tapestries have been traced back to their creation in the 1760s for a client named Francois de Bussy, a career diplomat serving the French royal court. The panels are joined by two very important commodes–highlights from the Frick’s furniture collection– that are customarily on view in the Fragonard Room. On the south wall stands a neoclassical mahogany veneered example by French Royal furniture maker Jean-Henri Riesener (1734–1806), an exact contemporary of Fragonard who was in great favor with Marie-Antoinette through the abolition of the monarchy (examples of his work for her can be found nearby in the South Hall of the Frick). The collaborative brilliance of royal ébénistes Gilles Joubert (1689–1775) and Roger Lacroix (1728–1799) is in evidence on the north wall of the East Gallery in the form of a commode created in 1769 for Madame Victoire, fourth daughter of Louis XV. Considered one of the finest in existence, it is a beautiful example of transitional furniture, displaying rococo features through its curvilinear form–a serpentine front and cabriole legs–and the forward-looking neoclassicism of its magnificent marquetry and gilt-bronze mounts.

A newly acquired Oushak carpet covers much of the large oak floor, suggestive of the way the rooms of the mansion appeared in photographs taken in the 1920s. The large medallion carpet comes from the ancient village in western Turkey where it was most likely made in the middle of the nineteenth century. Oushak carpets, in particular, have a long-standing connection to European painting, as artists working throughout the Renaissance often included them in interior scenes (the Frick’s portrait of Thomas Cromwell by Hans Holbein shows a sixteenth-century Oushak carpet used as a table covering).

Comments Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator Colin B. Bailey, "This summer, we seized upon the opportunity to place these remarkable masterpieces by Fragonard on view in a way they’ve never before been seen at the Frick. The result is stunning, in fact, even beyond our own level of anticipation, and we hope the public will also take this unprecedented opportunity to enjoy these paintings in their temporary setting between now and the end of September. Without exaggerating, they are Fragonard’s masterpieces, and indeed count among the greatest paintings produced in eighteenth-century Europe.

ABOUT THE FRAGONARD PANELS

The Fragonard Room of The Frick Collection is named for Fragonard’s Progress of Love (four panels painted between 1771 and 1773, the remaining ten between 1790 and 1791), considered by many to be the artist’s masterpiece and one of the greatest decorative ensembles of the eighteenth century. For his mistress the comtesse du Barry, Louis XV commissioned the architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux to design an entertainment pavilion on the estate of a chateau that the king had recently bought for her in the village of Louveciennes, just outside of Versailles. Fragonard (1732–1806) was commissioned to complete four large canvases–which have since come to be recognized as The Pursuit, The Meeting, The Lover Crowned, and Love Letters–for Madame du Barry’s dining room. The series was installed at Louveciennes by 1772, but by 1774 the inventory of paintings at the château recorded the series as having been returned to Fragonard and supplanted by works from another artist, Joseph Marie Vien (1716–1809), probably because of a change in the tastes of the period. Fragonard retained the paintings in his studio until 1790, when he spent a year living with a cousin at Grasse, where they were then installed. In Grasse, Fragonard painted ten additional panels (the two large-scale works Love Triumphant and Reverie; four Hollyhocks; and four overdoors of putti) to complete The Progress of Love ensemble. The four original panels are on view in the East Gallery along with Love Triumphant and Reverie.

Through the dealer Joseph Duveen, in February 1915 Henry Clay Frick acquired The Progress of Love from the sale of the banker and art collector J. P. Morgan’s extraordinary collection of furniture, bronzes, enamels, and paintings. Duveen Brothers made no profit on the transaction and agreed to install these large wall paintings and overdoors in what was to be the Frick’s Drawing Room, all costs of fabrication and lighting to be borne by the dealer. Duveen contracted the Parisian designers A. Decour et Cie–who had recently installed Jean-Baptiste Huet’s suite of large pastoral paintings in comte Moïse de Camondo’s mansion (the present Musée Nissim de Camondo)–to prepare a maquette of the new Fragonard Room at 1 East 70th Street. Fabrication of the room’s paneling began in June 1915, and by May 1916 the Drawing Room had been transformed into the present-day Fragonard Room, one of the most beloved galleries at the institution.

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