The Frick Collection has announced a promised gift of twenty-six artworks from Jean-Marie and Elizabeth "Betty" Eveillard.

The largest and most significant gift of drawings and pastels in the Frick Collection's history includes eighteen drawings, five pastels, two prints, and one oil sketch by artists including François Boucher, Edgar Degas, Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Thomas Lawrence, Jean-François Millet, Gustave Caillebotte, Maurice Quentin de La Tour, Jan Lievens, John Singer Sargent, and Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun. In the fall of 2022, the museum will present an exhibition of those works at its temporary Frick Madison location.

The Eveillards acquired their first important work in 1975 — John Singer Sargent's Virginie Amélie Avegno, Mme. Gautreau (Mme. X) — and over the decades assembled an outstanding collection of European works on paper, ranging from the end of the fifteenth century to the twentieth century and representing artists working in France, Britain, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands.

"It has been a pleasure studying and selecting from this remarkable collection of two longtime supporters of the Frick, assembled just as our own holdings have been, according to criteria of beauty, quality, and condition," said Xavier F. Salomon, the Frick's deputy director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator. "Each of the twenty-six works either appreciably deepens our holdings of a familiar artist or brings to us the work of one who is not — but should be — represented within our core areas of European Old Master art. In adding five pastels and an oil sketch, the gift also strengthens our examples of these media. We very much look forward to sharing these works with the public next year."

(Photo credit: Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Head of a Woman (1784); Joseph Coscia Jr./Frick Collection)