The Frick After Frick
Henry Clay Frick (posthumous portrait by John C. Johansen, given by Helen Clay Frick in 1943).
Even the portrait of Frick that presides over the Library gallery was acquired — and painted — after the founder’s death and thus makes a strong statement as to how much the trustees have shaped the collection we know today.
All of these works of art, by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Jean-Antoine Houdon, Jean-Simeon Chardin, and Piero della Francesca, reflect the broadening of the artistic sensibility of The Frick Collection beyond the founder’s artistic preferences to include pre-Impressionist French art, early Italian Renaissance art, and nude sculpture.
Hans Holbein’s Sir Thomas More, Anthony Van Dyck’s Sir John Suckling, Titian’s Pietro Aretino, and Gilbert Stuart’s George Washington exemplify Frick’s penchant for collecting portraits of famous men.
Frick also favored portraits of beautiful and influential women, including Sir Thomas Lawrence’s Julia, Lady Peel, William Hogarth’s Mary Edwards, and George Romney’s Lady Hamilton as ‘Nature.'
Gentle landscapes by artists such as John Constable, Joseph Mallord William Turner, Meindert Hobbema, and Jean-Baptiste Corot were also among the types of paintings Frick regarded as “pleasing to live with.”
Occasionally, Henry Clay Frick purchased genre scenes, most notably by Johannes Vermeer, but also by Edouard Manet, Philips Wouwerman, Hendrik van der Burgh (bought as by Pieter de Hooch), and Goya.
After Frick’s death, the trustees occasionally chose to follow Frick’s example, acquiring as they did, paintings such as John Constable’s The White Horse, Joshua Reynolds’ General John Burgoyne, Goya’s Duke of Osuna (all three once owned by J. Pierpont Morgan and acquired by the Frick trustees in 1943), and Jacob van Ruisdael’s Landscape with a Footbridge.
In the early years of the trustees’ stewardship over new acquisitions, the Committee on Paintings, established in 1924, favored the so-called Italian primitives, or pre-Renaissance and early Renaissance pictures of the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, as well as pre-Impressionist French nineteenth-century paintings.
The expansion of “Frick Taste” during the 1920s to include new categories of French and Italian art was encouraged by Frick’s daughter Helen, who exercised considerable influence over the Committee on Paintings as she also applied her extensive knowledge of art history and sought advice from the leading art historians of the day to urge the purchase of pictures by Duccio, Chardin, and Ingres.
The trend to seek out superlative examples in the areas of collecting that the trustees had added to the founding collection continued unabated during the 1930s.
During the 1940s, the Committee on Paintings acquired many works that fit within the bounds of Henry Clay Frick’s established taste—portraits by Rembrandt, Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Goya, as well as Constable’s and Ruisdael’s landscapes—but they also continued to follow their own path with acquisitions of pictures by Georges de la Tour, Claude Monet, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and Jean-Simeon Chardin.
By the 1950s, the trustees had approved an acquisitions policy and had come to accept the broadened taste of the institution through additional acquisitions. The constant was always that The Frick Collection be augmented only with works of the highest quality.
The fact that the earliest acquisitions made after Henry Clay Frick’s death so strongly favored the Italian primitives may be explained in part by the popularity and respect accorded to this category during the 1920s.
Auctions of collections, such as Achillito Chiesa’s many Italian primitives, made headlines in 1927.
For their first purchase, the trustees, and Helen Frick in particular, sought opinions from Bernard Berenson and asked her London-based friend Sir Robert Witt to go to Italy to have a look at the painting first-hand.
After the acquisition of Gentile Bellini’s Doge Mocenigo, the connoisseur Dan Fellows Platt noted endorsements of the picture by a veritable “who’s who” of Italian Renaissance art scholars, including Lionello Venturi, Baron von Hadeln, and Frederick Mason Perkins.
For Duccio’s Temptation of Christ on the Mountain, Helen Clay Frick sought the advice of famed Harvard professor Paul J. Sachs, who wrote to her that the trustees must move swiftly “because collectors from all over the world will be trying to secure the Duccio panels.”
Sachs also advised on the purchase of Chardin’s La Serinette, writing that one could not hope for a better example of Chardin’s work and that the Fogg Museum of Harvard would buy it if money were available.
When the trustees bought the Comtesse d’Haussonville, board member Walker Hines noted “that particular phase of French art is not well represented at present in the Collection, if it is represented at all,” thereby demonstrating the responsibilty the board felt as stewards of an institution with a responsibilty to educate the public.
This 1930 purchase of The Coronation of the Virgin by Paolo Veneziano was endorsed by renowned scholar Richard Offner, while Walker Hines noted “it has an exceptional historical and educational value for the Collection, as I believe we have no examples at all of Venetian pictures of this character.”
Very few paintings by the renowned early Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca came on the art market during the twentieth century and the trustees, coached by Helen Clay Frick, not surprisingly leaped at the chance to purchase this panel in 1936. It was later joined by three other small panels from the same altarpiece, two purchased in 1950 and the Crucifixion donated by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
Arguably, Jacques-Louis David was the most renowned of the Napoleonic era artists of France, and most responsible for ushering in the hard-edged portrait style exemplified by this portrait of the Comtesse Daru. Having purchased Ingres’s masterpiece the Comtesse d’Haussonville in 1927, the trustees likely believed that David’s earlier painting would make a meaningful and educational counterpoint for Collection visitors.
Although Henry Clay Frick had bought a few drawings during his lifetime, the works on paper that attracted him more were prints, including famous series by Rembrandt and Whistler. In 1936, the trustees ventured into drawings collecting for the institution with works by Pisanello, Goya, Altdorfer, Titian, and Rubens, all pictured here.
The paintings the trustees chose not to buy are as revealing as the ones they did choose to purchase. This list of paintings offered to the Collection in 1936 has notations in Helen Clay Frick’s hand that indicate her views on the offerings, doubting some attributions and questioning the cost or quality.
To our twenty-first century eyes, the most alarming of Helen Clay Frick’s comments is “Have 3 V’s,” meaning we have three Vermeers and don’t need another — even if it is today the pride of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. We can take comfort knowing that this painting never would have been accorded an export license because it was kept in Austria at the personal insistence of Adolf Hitler.
Three years later, the trustees were offered a remarkable range of styles and periods by virtually all of the major art dealers of the day: Wildenstein, Knoedler, Scott & Fowles, Rosenberg, Seligmann, and Perls. Among the offerings were numerous Impressionist and post-Impressionist works by Renoir, Cezanne, and Van Gogh. At the time Frick Director Frederick Mortimer Clapp wrote, “So many offers of pictures have come in that it is difficult to know what to do with them.”
Clapp had no doubt about this picture, however. Giorgione’s “Allendale Nativity” was the most coveted painting on the market in 1938 and 1939 and Clapp desperately wanted it for the Collection, ending virtually every letter he penned to Helen with a plea for the purchase until he finally wrote “I weep to think that we have lost the great Titian-Giorgione … [Samuel H.] Kress has made it his. I doubt whether a similar picture will be seen again.”
This draft for an acquisitions policy was written in 1940 but never ratified by the full board of trustees. Not surprisingly, quality and greatness are listed as the top criteria and concern that an acquisition harmonize with the existing collection ran a close second. Item 4 significantly proposes that the Collection might acquire more modern works so long as they are exhibited on the second floor to create a “Louvre” (first floor of old masters) and “Luxembourg” (second floor of more modern works).
Despite the expressed musings in the acquisitions policy draft about collecting modern art, the 1940s became the most conservative period for trustee acquisitions, augmenting the collection with portraits of famous men (the Duke of Osuna, Nicholas Ruts, and General Burgoyne) by Goya, Rembrandt, and Reynolds, gentle landscapes such as Constable’s The White Horse, and “pleasing-to-live-with” works by Greuze, all in the vein of Frick’s own collecting taste. Earlier in the century all of these works were in the collection of Frick’s contemporary J. Pierpont Morgan.
Other paintings added during this period that did not have a Morgan provenance were two ovals by Gainsborough, another artist favored by Frick, and Ruisdael’s haunting landscape that had earlier been part of the distinguished collection of Baron Louis Nathaniel von Rothschild in Vienna.
Much of the reluctance to buy “modern” paintings came from Helen Clay Frick herself, even though she somewhat grudgingly acknowledged that segregating them on the second floor would be acceptable. Ironically, during these years of conservative purchases during the 1940s, the trustees did venture into new acquisitions territory, buying two Cezannes and a Gauguin. They soon concluded they had erred and deaccessioned all three. By 1950 Helen’s position had hardened as she wrote “50 years from now how many of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists will still be thought of as anything but trash.”
Works that carry a distinguished provenance are generally regarded as “self-selected” for high quality, and these two acquisitions of the 1940s, Chardin’s Still life with Plums and Antoine Coysevox’s Robert de Cotte are no exception, having emerged from the esteemed Parisian collection of the David-Weill family to be sold to the trustees by Wildenstein & Co.
Acquisitions made after Henry Clay Frick’s death were all but exclusively paintings, as was appropriate given Frick’s own preference for that medium. However, Helen Frick was a noteworthy scholar of Jean-Antoine Houdon, so it is not surprising that two of the four acquisitions in sculpture made between the 1930s and 1945 were by him: Diana the Huntress and the Marquis de Miromesnil.
The 1960s brought some remarkable masterpieces into the collection, ranging from Gentile da Fabriano’s Madonna and Child to Claude Lorrain’s magisterial Sermon on the Mount, to a rare grisaille painting (one of four in the world) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder once owned by King Charles I of England, to Francois-Hubert Drouais’ charming Comte and Chevalier de Choiseul as Savoyards.
After the purchase of this portrait by Hans Memling in 1968, there was a twenty-three-year hiatus in trustee acquisitions of paintings for the Collection. This was at first due to the concentration of expenditures on the construction of the Reception Hall and 70th Street garden, and later to the rise in prices in the art market in general. Through a generous bequest from Arthemise Redpath, an early painting by Antoine Watteau was purchased in 1991.
Following the purchase of the Watteau Portal of Valenciennes, the trustees resumed their practice of adding judiciously to the collection, always with an eye for quality. Among the works acquired since 1991 are two pastel portraits by Greuze, an unusual bronze relief by Alessandro Algardi, a glorious working clock by Pierre-Henry Lepaute mounted on a sculpture group of The Dance of Time by Clodion, and a tour-de-force terracotta portrait bust by Joseph Chinard.
Helen Clay Frick argued vociferously with the board of trustees over the matter of accepting gifts for the collection and she ultimately resigned over the issue. Since that time in 1961, the Collection has benefitted enormously from gifts, the first of which were works by Piero della Francesca, Francesco Laurana, and Andrea del Verrocchio donated by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
These works have all been donated to the Collection since 1961, by Dr. and Mrs. Ira Kauffman, Eugene and Claire Thaw, Lore Heinemann, Walter and Vera Eberstadt, the Quentin Foundation, and Henrietta Lockwood.
Other meaningful donations have come from family members, most recently the magnificent self-portrait of Spanish artist Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. Many of these works were originally acquired by Henry Clay Frick himself and now, as the family continues the tradition he began, can be seen and appreciated by the public.