After five years of construction, the Frick Collection will reopen on April 17 at its historic location at 1 East 70th Street in New York City. Beginning June 18 and running through Sept. 5, visitors will be able to view an exhibition titled “Love Letters in the Painting of Johannes Vermeer,” which places alongside the Dutch master’s iconic painting titled The Mistress and the Maid, made around 1667 and in the collection since 1919, two other works lent for the occasion. They are The Love Letter, dated between 1669 and 1670, from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and Woman Writing a Letter with Servants, from the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin and painted around 1670-1672.
Deputy Director Xavier Salomon noted, “Mistress and Domestics is the last masterpiece acquired by tycoon Henry Clay Frick before his death. On the heels of the reopening to the public, it is particularly significant to inaugurate the new special exhibition galleries with an in-depth look at the work of Vermeer, one of the most beloved artists in our collection.”
This exclusive exhibition, curated by Robert Fucci, a scholar of seventeenth-century Dutch art at the University of Amsterdam, brings together for the first time three of Vermeer’s paintings on one of the key themes of his painting, namely, epistolary writing and the exchange of letters in the context of seventeenth-century domestic daily life. The works illuminate the inner and secret lives of the subjects with an enigmatic and mysterious narrative effect. The viewer may wonder: what will be written in those letters? And what will be the dynamics that lead the subjects depicted to exchange them? In particular, the three paintings in the exhibition highlight the role of women of different classes within the domestic sphere and the complex relationship between mistress and maids in an atmosphere of tensions that fuel the epistolary exchange.
During the years the gallery was closed, its masterpieces were housed in the Marcel Breuer Brutalist building on Madison Avenue.
For the reopening, the mansion at 1 East 70th Street, bequeathed to New York in 1935 by Helen Frick, the daughter of steel billionaire and collector Henry Clay Frick, was renovated with a restyling by Selldorf Architects, Beyer Blinder Belle and Planners. The project resulted in new spaces on the ground floor and the opening of a new set of rooms on the main floor in what was originally the Frick family’s private apartment.
