Established decades apart and on separate coasts, New York’s Frick Collection and the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, CA, are both fine examples of a museum type that focuses on the viewpoint and taste of an individual founder. Henry Clay Frick was by no means the first American to create a museum for the public with his own holdings, but the 1935 opening of the institution bearing his name sparked international headlines and set an example followed subsequently by many others, including Californian Norton Simon. Indeed, exactly four decades later, Simon turned to the Frick as a model for his own institution. It is therefore fitting that the two organizations should one day become collaborators, and this winter, they inaugurate an ongoing reciprocal loan arrangement with the Frick presentation of Masterpieces of European Painting from the Norton Simon Museum. On view in New York from February 10 through May 10 in the Frick’s Oval Room will be five sixteenth- and seventeenth-century masterpieces, none of which has left its Southern California home in almost three decades.