Old Masters hung in the steel magnate's own house, on the walls where he put them. Small, quiet, and the best hour of art in New York.
The house is half of it
Henry Clay Frick made his money in coke and steel, ran Carnegie’s operations during the Homestead strike, and spent the last decades of his life buying paintings. He built this house on Fifth Avenue in 1914 explicitly so that it would become a public gallery after his death, and it did, in 1935.
What makes it different from every other museum in New York is that the paintings are still in a house. They hang in rooms with furniture, carpets, fireplaces and daylight, at domestic scale and domestic height, mostly where Frick or his curators put them. You look at a Holbein above a sofa. It changes how the pictures read, and once you have seen art hung this way the white-cube galleries elsewhere feel like a compromise.
What is on the walls
For the size of it, the quality is extraordinary. Three Vermeers. Bellini’s St Francis in the Desert, which is the single best painting in New York by a number of reasonable arguments. Holbein’s portraits of Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, facing each other across a fireplace, which is a curatorial joke with four hundred years of hindsight behind it. Rembrandt’s late self-portrait. Goya, El Greco, Titian, Turner, Constable, Whistler, Ingres, and a room of Fragonard panels made for Madame du Barry.
The Garden Court, a glass-roofed atrium with a fountain and a colonnade, is where everyone sits down, and it was added in the 1930s conversion rather than being part of the original house.
The renovation
The mansion closed for several years for a major restoration and expansion, during which the collection lived in the Breuer building on Madison Avenue. It has since returned to Fifth Avenue, with the second floor — the family’s private living quarters, never previously open — now showing works in the bedrooms, and a purpose-built auditorium underneath.
If you visited before the closure, the second floor is new to you and worth the return.
How long, and how
An hour and a half is right. Two if you take the audio guide, which is included and unusually good.
Timed tickets online. It is a small building and capacity is genuinely limited, so walk-up on a weekend is a gamble.
There is a pay-what-you-wish window on certain evenings; check the calendar.
Photography inside has historically been prohibited and the policy is enforced. That is part of why it is the quietest gallery in New York — nobody is queuing to photograph anything.
The Frick Art Reference Library next door is a scholarly resource open to researchers and is one of the great art history libraries.
More Museums
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Two million objects across five thousand years, in a building you cannot see in a day. Pick three departments and accept that you are missing the rest.
Museum of Modern Art
Starry Night, the melting clocks, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Warhol's soup cans, in six floors that can genuinely be done in three hours.
American Museum of Natural History
The blue whale, the dinosaurs and the dioramas, in a rambling complex of twenty-odd interconnected buildings on the west side of Central Park.