For the first time in more than ten years, The Frick Collection has published a combined general guide to its collections, history, and building, a softcover volume that features the most recent scholarship and new photography. The book has been produced with the BNP Paribas Foundation, which has created a series of beautifully designed popular guides to French museums. The Frick publication is only the second produced in the United States and will be available in June in both English and French.
Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919), the coke and steel industrialist, philanthropist, and art collector, left his New York residence and his remarkable collection of Western paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts to the public "for the purpose of establishing and maintaining a gallery of art, encouraging and developing the study of fine arts and of advancing the general knowledge of kindred subjects." Designed and built for Mr. Frick in 1913 and 1914 by Thomas Hastings of Carrère and Hastings, the mansion provides a grand domestic setting, reminiscent of the noble houses of Europe, for the masterworks from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century that it contains. The museum opened to the public more than seventy-five years ago, in 1935, and has become a model for similar collector-founded institutions worldwide. Visitors today appreciate the Frick for its unparalled domestic setting, its peerless masterpieces of European art in all media, and the romance of its association with America's Gilded Age. They encounter the work of a wide range of artists including Duccio, Antico, Verrocchio, Bellini, Severo da Ravenna, Holbein, Titian, Bronzino, El Greco, Riccio, Susini, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Vermeer, Boulle, Joubert, Lacroix, Boucher, Carlin, Fragonard, Riesener, Clodion, Hogarth, Gainsborough, Houdon, Goya, Turner, Constable, Ingres, Corot, Manet, Degas, Renoir, and Whistler.Videos