Dreaming the Emerald City: The Collections of Charles and Emma Frye and Horace C. Henry

In Dreaming the Emerald City two foundational collections of Seattle are brought together for the first time: the collections of Charles and Emma Frye and of Horace C. Henry. The Fryes and Henry collected art during roughly the same period, from the 1890s to the 1920s, and they cemented their legacies by keeping their collections in Seattle. In 1927 the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington became the state’s first public art museum, and the Frye Art Museum, named after both Charles and Emma, opened to the public in 1952 as the city’s first free museum.

The exhibition compares the Fryes’ and Henry’s collecting directions: these collectors shared an interest in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century art, but Henry focused on American and French paintings and the Fryes primarily collected German and Austrian art. Despite their different foci, the collections have some artists in common, including William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905), Louis-Gabriel-Eugene Isabey (1803–86), Eugene Louis Boudin (1824–98), and Childe Hassam (1859–1935). No evidence suggests that competitiveness between the collectors drove their buying decisions; comparable purchases by the Fryes and Henry probably resulted from affordability, market availability, and collecting trends.

Dreaming the Emerald City—the first exhibition to display the Frye Art Museum Collection along with loaned artwork—showcases significant paintings from both museums’ holdings: for example, George Inness’s Goochland, West Virginia (1884) and Julian Alden Weir’s Farmhouse (c. 1888–90) from the Henry and Hermann Corrodi’s Venice (c. 1900) and Dániel Somogyi’s View of Königssee (1878) from the Frye. Exhibited together, Henry’s and the Fryes’ collections reveal important genres and themes from European and American art history, including Barbizon School landscapes and Orientalist and Romantic subjects. Also on view will be archival photographs and exhibition catalogues documenting the exhibition programs and building projects undertaken by the Frye Art Museum and the Henry Art Gallery since their founding.