Frye Salon

Frye Salon features nearly one hundred fifty paintings from the Frye Art Museum’s collections hung floor to ceiling—a mode of display referred to as a salon-style hang. The installation approximates the dramatic viewing experience enjoyed by visitors to the art gallery in Charles and Emma Frye’s Seattle home in the first decades of the twentieth century.

First opened in 2013, Frye Salon originally focused solely on the Founding Collection; in 2018, the premise evolved to include works that entered the collection after the Museum opened in 1952. Twenty-two paintings—including early acquisitions and recent donations—have been rotated in to highlight the ways in which the Museum has continually honored and expanded upon the vision of the Fryes.

Charles and Emma Frye developed their passion for art at the Columbian Exposition, a world fair held in Chicago in 1893. The experience had a great influence on the painterly subjects and artists the couple would collect in years to come. Over the next four decades, they sought out canvases by an international roster of artists from Europe and the United States, with a particular focus on works by German artists. Frye Salon gathers many of these works together to recall the abundance and visual splendor of the salon-style exhibitions held in the Fryes' home a century ago.