[www.frick.org]  This fall The Frick Collection will present Vincent van Gogh‘s Portrait of a Peasant (Patience Escalier). The painting has not left its home institution, the Norton Simon Museum, in Pasadena, CA, in nearly forty years, making this a particularly rare and exciting viewing opportunity for East Coast audiences. This modern masterpiece will be shown in the Frick’s Oval Room from October 30, 2012, through January 20, 2013, and will be accompanied by lectures and gallery talks. The special loan is part of an ongoing exchange program with the Norton Simon Museum that began in 2009 when a group of five works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries travelled to New York. Other loans have followed: the Frick’s Comtesse d’Haussonville by Ingres was shown at the Norton Simon in the fall of 2009, and Memling‘s Portrait of a Man is currently on view there, remaining…