A New Handbook Of Collection Highlights Has Been Published In Conjunction With A Major Exhibition That Celebrates The Works Of Fine And Decorative Arts At The Heart Of The Frick Experience
This fall the exhibition galleries at The Frick Art Museum are being taken over by the permanent collection for the first exhibition in eight years to focus exclusively on the works of fine and decorative art in the collection of the Frick Art & Historical Center (The Frick Pittsburgh). The Frick Collects: From Rubens to Monet celebrates the works of fine and decorative art at the heart of the Frick experience. The exhibition will remain on view through May 14, 2017. Admission is free.
Claude Monet (1840-1926) Banks of Thr Seine at Lavacourt (Bords de la Seine a Lavacourt) 1879. The Frick Pittsburgh.
Located on the Pittsburgh estate of late-19th-century industrialist Henry Clay Frick, The Frick Pittsburgh is the steward of collections left as a legacy to the people of Pittsburgh by Frick’s daughter, Helen Clay Frick. The permanent collections include fine and decorative arts, cars, carriages, historic objects, and buildings. The Frick experience includes The Frick Art Museum, the Car and Carriage Museum, Clayton, the Frick family Gilded Age mansion, and six acres of beautifully landscaped lawns and gardens. Also included are an Education Center, the Frick children’s playhouse (designed by renowned architects Alden & Harlow), a large working greenhouse (also designed by Alden & Harlow), The Café at the Frick, and the Grable Visitor Center, which houses the Frick Museum Store. (More information is available online at www.TheFrickPittsburgh.org.)
Arthur Devis (1712-1787) Sir Joshua Vanneck and His Family, 1752. The Frick Pittsburgh, featured in The Frick Collects: Rubens to Monet
From Henry Clay Frick’s early purchases, to his daughter Helen’s collecting interests, through to the acquisitions that have been made by the museum in recent years, (through this exhibition) visitors will see and learn about the enduring legacy of the Frick family as art collectors. Objects will be brought together to tell a unified story—a story that doesn’t stop with Henry Clay Frick’s early purchases for Clayton, but continues, looking at both Henry and Helen as the collectors who have shaped the Frick Art & Historical Center’s holdings.
The earliest acquisitions in the collection date to Henry Clay Frick’s bachelor days. Before his marriage (and for the first months after his marriage) he lived in downtown Pittsburgh at the fashionable Monongahela House. He bought his first paintings and decorative objects for his rooms there: an elaborate rococo revival clock and candelabra set purchased through Tiffany’s, an ebonized cabinet, and his first documented painting purchase, a landscape by local artist George Hetzel.
Antip Kuzmichev (Russian, 1856-1917) for Tiffany & Co, Tea Set, 1892. The Frick Pittsburgh; featured in the current The Frick Collects: Rubens to Monet exhibition.
When they moved into Clayton, Henry Clay Frick and his wife furnished it as many young couples do—most of the purchases were new, fashionable and of the period. Frick had met his wife, Adelaide Howard Childs (1859-1931) in February 1881. Adelaide was the sixth daughter of the wealthy Pittsburgh Childs family, who were manufacturers and importers of shoes and boots. For young couples during America’s Gilded Age like the Fricks, art collecting was not simply a way to exercise taste and create a suitable environment—although these were important considerations. More subtly the right objects gave their owner a sense of history and pedigree. Collecting was a personal pleasure and an indicator of status, discernment and good taste.
The Frick Pittsburgh: A Guide to the Collection, Scala Arts Publishers, Inc., 2016. Cover features Peter Paul Rubens’ Portrait of Charlotte-Marguerite de Montmorency, Princess of Conde, circa 1610. The Frick Pittsburgh. (PRNewsFoto/The Frick Pittsburgh)
The rise in American collecting of this period also coincided with the establishment of the first museums in the country, including the Wadsworth Athenaeum of Hartford, Connecticut in 1842, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1870, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1872, and in 1896, Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute. As the century progressed, forming collections and bequeathing them to the public became one way to put wealth and the accumulation of a collection to public service.
It was Helen Clay Frick’s vision that led to the restoration of Clayton as a house museum. The Frick Art Museum, which was opened to the public in 1970 just a block south of Clayton, was built primarily for the collection she developed, rather than the one she inherited. Helen even had the family cars and carriages carefully preserved and brought back to Pittsburgh from the family’s Massachusetts summer estate.
The Frick Art Museum opened in 1970 with its main galleries devoted to Helen’s greatest interests—early Italian Renaissance paintings and eighteenth-century French fine and decorative art. Since Helen’s death in 1984, the collection has continued to develop—through generous donations and acquisitions that reflect the same quality as that evinced by the founding collection. Through the foresight of Helen Clay Frick who valued Pittsburgh, and who understood that her youth at Clayton was one of unique privilege—not simply financially, but aesthetically—these collections are the heart of the experience at the Frick Pittsburgh.
The Frick Collects: From Rubens to Monet features many of the museum’s most significant objects and tells the story of the Frick today and how it has evolved from its founding collections.
The Frick Collects: From Rubens to Monet is composed of 42 paintings, 26 decorative arts pieces, nine pieces of furniture, six works on paper, and three examples of sculpture, and is organized by acquisition date, allowing visitors to perceive the development of the collection, from Henry Clay Frick‘s earliest purchases to recent museum acquisitions. Thematic sections include: From Apartment to Starter Home: The Collecting Begins, covering the years 1881 to 1892; The Confident Collector, encompassing purchases made through the 1890s to around 1906; Collecting with Ambition, which includes important purchases made from other collections and covers the years when Frick was purchasing with the intention of creating a public gallery; Her Father’s Daughter, which elucidates Helen Clay Frick’s collecting interests; and, Expanding the Legacy, which includes the establishment of The Frick Art Museum and acquisitions made since the museum’s founding.
Accompanying The Frick Collects: Rubens to Monet is a new 120-page guide to the collection, produced in collaboration with Scala, specialists in museum publications. The Frick Pittsburgh, A Guide to the Collection is the first publication since 1993 to focus on The Frick Pittsburgh‘s permanent collection. Featuring an introduction by Frick Director Robin Nicholson and contextual essays by Director of Curatorial Affairs Sarah Hall and Associate Curator of Decorative Arts Dawn Reid Brean, it is available for purchase at The Frick Museum Store for $16.95 retail ($15.26 for members). The accompanying publication is generously underwritten by The Richard C. von Hess Foundation.
Frick Director Robin Nicholson comments, “Regular visitors to the Frick are familiar with the spectacular Rubens portrait that is regularly on view at The Frick Art Museum and likely know the dazzling Monet that typically hangs in the sitting room at Clayton. The Frick Collects features these iconic works and other extraordinary paintings and decorative arts from the collection, as well as more recent acquisitions, such as Meissonier’s 1806, Jena. By bringing these works together in our exhibition galleries, we are putting the spotlight on our own world-class collection, and taking the opportunity to tell more of our own stories—both about individual objects and about the Frick as a whole.”
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