The Frick Collection: The Essential Guide

An informative guide to the most iconic works in The Frick Collection honoring the museum’s reopening post-renovation.

From paintings and sculpture to decorative arts, this publication encapsulates the range and depth of Henry Clay Frick’s collection. Organized chronologically and by geographic school, The Frick Collection is designed to offer a sense of the connections between, and diversity among, contemporaneous artistic production across different fields, genres, and media in early modern Europe.

When American industrialist Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919) built his New York home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, he intended for it to one day become a public art museum for the ＂use and benefit of all persons whomsoever.＂ After his death and that of his wife, Adelaide, in 1931, the house was transformed into a museum and was opened to the public in December 1935. The Frick’s daughter Helen Clay Frick (1888-1984), along with a board of trustees, was instrumental in the continuance of her father’s legacy and the care of his bequest. Over the years, the collection grew and the number of visitors increased, requiring renovation campaigns in the 1970s and 2020s to accommodate these changes, the latest giving access to the public for the first time to a suite of rooms on the second floor. Originally the Frick family’s private quarters, these rooms are now galleries for works of art, providing space for more objects to be on view. The scope of the collection, which spans from about 1300 to 1900, was never intended to be encyclopedic and reflects the taste of the founder, who chose to acquire works for his home that were ＂pleasing to live with.＂

Aimee Ng is a curator at the Frick, where she is a specialist in Italian Renaissance art. Giulio Dalvit is the Frick’s assistant curator of sculpture, where he is a specialist of fifteenth-century Italian sculpture and painting. Marie-Laure Buku Pongo is the Frick’s assistant curator of decorative arts.