24-04-2025
Henry Clay Frick Built His Collection With Passion and Patience
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. Image Frick's passion for showing off extended to the Fifth Avenue mansion he began building in 1913. Credit... The Frick Collection/Frick Art Research Library Archives
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