This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times.
In the Gilded Age, when newly wealthy Americans sought to advertise their social status here and abroad, several of them turned to what had long been a practice of the established rich: art collecting.
Henry Clay Frick, who made his fortune in coke and steel, had appreciated art even as a young man, particularly prints and sketches. “Some of them he made himself,” said Colin Bailey, director of the Morgan Library and Museum and an expert on Frick.
But Frick’s interest ultimately turned toward higher-profile works by Europe’s old masters, such as Rembrandt and Vermeer, as well as the creations of more modern geniuses like Manet and Degas. Over decades he acquired one of the finest private collections in the world and exhibited them in a Fifth Avenue mansion that is now a major museum. The Frick Collection’s home, newly renovated, reopened in April in New York.
With the competitive zeal that fueled his success in business, Frick vied for works of art against others who enjoyed tremendous wealth: the banker J.P. Morgan; Peter Widener, a founding organizer of United States Steel and the American Tobacco Company; and Isabella Stewart Gardner, founder of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
“He hated losing a painting he wanted,” said Ian Wardropper, who resigned earlier this year after 14 years as director of the Frick Collection, the museum that Frick created.
Frick’s passion for showing off extended to the Fifth Avenue mansion he began building in 1913. In Wardropper’s book, “The Fricks Collect: An American Family and the Evolution of Taste in the Gilded Age,” he recounts some of Frick’s interaction with another collecting competitor, Benjamin Altman, founder of the B. Altman department store in New York City.
Wardropper writes that Frick was envious of Altman’s 90-foot art gallery in his new house on Fifth Avenue and asked Roland Knoedler, the New York art dealer, to tell him the room’s dimensions. “When Frick’s gallery was completed in 1914,” Wardropper wrote in his book, “it was 96 feet long, the largest private gallery in New York. “
Before he died in 1919, Frick bequeathed his mansion, where he had lived with his wife, his two surviving children and his art, to create a museum and provided a $15 million endowment to finance its maintenance and improvements. The museum opened in 1935. Nearly half of its 1,800 works were originally acquired by Frick.
Five years ago, the museum closed for an extensive renovation; its collection was temporarily moved to the former Madison Avenue home of the Whitney Museum of American Art, now located Downtown on Gansevoort Street.
During the renovation, the Frick mansion lost its 149-seat, oval music room. But it gained, among other amenities, a 220-seat auditorium built beneath the 70th Street Garden (which had to be replanted); new entry points; a two-level reception hall, coat check and cafe; and Special Exhibition galleries, among other additions.
The original, first-level galleries were given makeovers, while the living spaces on the second floor, which had long been used as office space and were off limits to visitors, were transformed into new galleries to show off a collection of significant portraits, clocks and other works and treasures.
The expansion and refurbishment, which cost $220 million, was led by Annabelle Selldorf of Selldorf Architects, with Beyer Blinder Belle Architects and Planners and the garden designer Lynden B. Miller.
Master craftspeople took care of many of the details, like creating a new cantilevered marble staircase to the second floor (Wilkstone of Paterson, N.J.); restoring woodwork (Craftekt of West New York, N.J.); recreating the green silk velvet wall coverings in the West Gallery (Prelle of Lyon, France); cleaning and updating lighting (Aurora Lampworks, Brooklyn); and making new tassels, fringe, cords and other frills used throughout the house (Passementerie Verrier Paris).
In building his collection, Frick had often been persistent in obtaining the works of art he desired, experts said. He negotiated for months in 1906 before buying a star of his collection, a Rembrandt “Self-Portrait” from 1658. He had competition from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and J.P. Morgan, the museum board’s president, but they couldn’t agree on a price with the seller. Subsequently, the painting was bought by Knoedler, the head of Knoedler & Company, and another dealer who offered it to Frick for $225,000.
Frick ultimately cut a deal to pay the $225,000, but made up the last $25,000 by returning a painting by Jules Breton that he had bought 11 years earlier, according to Cynthia Saltzman, author of “Old Masters, New World: America’s Raid on Europe’s Great Pictures.”
“Frick had bought the painting for $14,000 and calculated that it was now worth $25,000,” Saltzman said in an interview. “He paid the $200,000, returned the Breton and got the Rembrandt.”
Wardropper said that Frick had traditional tastes, favoring landscapes and portraits of famous men and beautiful women, over anything edgy. He typically passed on nudes or religious paintings, except for Giovanni Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert.”
Frick was born in 1849 in West Overton, Pa., 40 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. His father was a farmer. His mother’s family owned the Old Overholt whiskey distillery.
Frick attended “one term of college and worked as an accountant in the distillery and as a clerk in a hardware store in Pittsburgh,” Wardropper said. Then he joined a cousin as a partner in a business that manufactured coke, a fuel created by heating coal.
“Starting with family loans he eventually bought out his partners and within a decade had a monopoly on the world’s supply of coke and was a millionaire,” Wardropper said. Later he would become partners with Andrew Carnegie, the American industrialist.
Though devoted to family and friends and charitable to the public at large, Frick was known to be ruthless in business. He brokered no leniency in 1892, when the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers voted to strike at the Carnegie company’s plant in Hempstead, Pa.
Frick hired Pinkerton detectives to convince the strikers to back down. Eight people were killed and many wounded in a gun battle. Frick was widely condemned.
Later that month, Alexander Berkman, a Russian professed anarchist, tried to assassinate Frick in his office. Frick was shot twice — in the shoulder and neck — and stabbed. But he dictated a memo to his mother and to Carnegie that read: “Was twice shot, but not dangerously. There is no necessity for you to come home. I am still in shape to fight the battle out.”
From prints, Frick moved on to begin buying works by French painters of the Barbizon school such as Corot and Daubigny, said Wardropper. Then, possibly influenced by the tastes of other wealthy collectors, he moved on to pursue old masters.
From 1900 to 1909 Frick returned many Barbizon works and bought paintings by Vermeer, Salomon van Ruysdael and Hobbema, as well as Rembrandt and English painters such as Gainsborough and Reynolds. In 1914, he bought paintings by Manet, Renoir and Degas.
Wardropper said that one of Frick’s daughters, Helen Clay Frick, who died in 1984 and managed the collection after his death, was responsible for acquiring many of the early Italian Renaissance paintings, including works by Duccio, Cimabue and Piero della Francesca. She also bought Ingres’ painting, “Comtesse d’Haussonville” (1845), one of the Frick’s most admired works.
Henry Frick acquired French and Renaissance furniture through the dealer Joseph Duveen who also sold him a set of Fragonard paintings entitled “The Progress of Love,” which are now in the renovated Fragonard Room at the Frick. The price was $1.25 million, Frick’s costliest purchase.
Wardropper said in his later years Frick enjoyed strolling downstairs in the evening, cigar in hand, to admire his collection. He recalled that Helen Frick said that a week before her father died, she discovered him lying on a couch in one of the galleries facing two works he loved: Velazquez’s “King Philip IV of Spain,” and Goya’s “The Forge.”
Frick said that it made sense to keep some of your wealth in art that surrounds you, not just invested in bonds. With the former, he said, “you can draw your dividend daily.”
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