The AGO Hangs Its Frames Empty
From 17 October, In Plain Sight shows 31 historic frames from North America's largest museum frame collection, with no pictures inside them.
The Art Gallery of Ontario holds North America’s largest museum collection of historic picture frames. From Saturday 17 October, it is putting 31 of them on show with nothing inside.
In Plain Sight: Highlights from the AGO’s Collection of Historic Frames covers frames from the late 1400s, when frames became a popular commodity, to the early 1900s. They come from England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands.
What you’ll see
The frames hang in the Leonard Rotunda on Level 1, grouped by period and regional style. Some are mounted one inside another.
- Styles: Renaissance, Gothic Revival, Baroque, Rococo and Louis XIV Revival
- Materials: wood, rare polished stone, ebony, copper alloys, papier-mâché and gold leaf
- Techniques: carving, punchwork, heraldic symbols, gilding and trompe l’oeil, including wood polished to pass for marble
Two frames with names
Most of the makers are unknown. Two are not.
- Kugler and Diebal: Mattheus Kugler and Joseph Diebal were among the framers hired by the court of Augustus III to reframe one hundred paintings at the Dresden Royal Court. Their signed 18th-century frame shows the court’s rich gilding and ornamented corners.
- Mary Ashfield: the largest frame in the AGO’s collection, carved by the English craftswoman in 1671 for a City of London commission. It is on view for the first time since its acquisition.
“Picture frames are too often unfairly overlooked when in fact, they can tell us so much about what people thought was valuable and how they believed art should be seen,” say the co-curators, Eric Birkle, Julia Campbell-Such and Adam Harris Levine.
Why the AGO has so many
An anonymous gift of more than 800 historic frames arrived in the mid-1990s. Each is catalogued as an artwork, and the AGO is the only museum in Canada with a dedicated frames conservator on its conservation team. It lends frames to other museums too: two go to the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin in December.
Before you go
- Dates: 17 October 2026 to November 2027
- Where: Leonard Rotunda, Level 1, AGO, 317 Dundas St W
- Free for: Ontarians under 25, Indigenous Peoples, AGO Members and Annual Passholders
- Look for the reframed paintings elsewhere in the gallery, including Jeremias Schultz’s Portrait of Eleonora Susette (1770s).
Sources
Andrew Lovesey is Editor-in-Chief of Not An Atlas, and always on the hunt for the next big thing: where to go, where to stay and what's worth the photo. His first trip was to the family cottage in Prince Edward Island, all rolling hills, red sand cliffs and jellyfish drifting in the North Atlantic. He'll sit anywhere but the middle seat (no armrest wars), never flies without the adapter that lets his AirPods play the in-flight movie, and has eaten at a McDonald's in every country he's visited. Iceland gets a pass because it doesn't have one. He once learned to bead earrings from Aleqa Hammond, Greenland's first female premier, on a ship in the Northwest Passage, and will tell anyone who'll listen that Cincinnati is wildly underrated. Friends say charming, driven and loyal. His mum says persuasive. Next stop: Greece.
