Coypel’s Don Quixote Tapestries: Illustrating a Spanish Novel in Eighteenth-Century France: Frick Collection, New York

Charles Coypel (1694−1752), painter to Louis XV, created a series of twenty-eight paintings (also called cartoons) to be woven into tapestries by the Gobelins manufactory in Paris. Twenty-seven were painted between 1714 and 1734, with the last scene realized just before Coypel’s death in 1751. In 2015 (the 400th anniversary of the publication of the second volume of Don Quixote), the Frick will bring together a complete series of Coypel’s scenes, which will be shown in the Oval Room and East Gallery.
The exhibition will include five of Coypel’s original paintings, never before seen in New York, on loan from the Palais Impérial de Compiègne and the Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris. These will be joined by three Gobelins tapestry panels from the J. Paul Getty Museum and two Flemish tapestries inspired by Coypel from The Frick Collection, which have not been on view in more than ten years. The series is completed by eighteen prints and books from the Hispanic Society of America, New York.