Frick’s rapidly growing art collection soon filled Clayton’s sumptuous interiors. Around 1895, his enhanced status at the Carnegie Company and developing acumen as an art collector led to an explosion of painting purchases. Frick was truly becoming a collector.
By Ian Wardropper
The following is an excerpt from The Fricks Collect: An American Family and the Evolution in Taste in the Gilded Age
by Ian Wardropper and released by Rizzoli Electa and the Frick Collection.
Henry and Adelaide’s marriage in 1882 prompted the purchase of their first home, an Italianate-style house built in the 1860s in fashionable Point Breeze, several miles from the center of Pittsburgh. They hired local architect Andrew J. Peebles to renovate the house, renamed Clayton, for $50,000, twice as much as was spent on the property itself.
Prior to Clayton, Henry’s taste in furnishing is revealed in a garniture he purchased in 1881 to ornament his Monongahela House rooms. The ornate onyx and gilt bronze clock is flanked by matching candelabra that were made in France by R. Lefebvre & Fils Inc. and retailed in the United States by Tiffany & Company. Frick took them from the hotel to Clayton, where, despite subsequent renovations, they continued to occupy a place of honor on the reception room mantel two decades on. Years later, he still favored intricate French furniture and decorations, though his tastes advanced to considerably more sophisticated eighteenth-century furniture by André-Charles Boulle and garnitures in Sèvres porcelain.
The Fricks followed popular tastes of the day, centered on the Aesthetic Movement, an eclectic combination of styles ranging from Gothic to Islamic and Chinese motifs. Upholstered and fringed parlor chairs and richly carved bedroom furniture followed the dictates of English architect Charles L. Eastlake’s influential Hints on Household Taste (1868). Letters from Frick to New York furniture designer and manufacturers D. S. Hess & Company reveal how closely he supervised the work at Clayton, applying the exacting standards and obsessive bookkeeping that characterized his own business dealings. Hess & Company’s mahogany and leather armchair, purchased in 1883, gives a sense of the decor the couple admired. Its basic lines are rectangular and functional, but it is enlivened by the tracery of a Gothic arch at the back and pierced arm rests in an elegant pattern. A carved tablet bearing Frick’s monogram emblazons the chair back. Clayton’s subsequent renovations make it difficult to reconstruct the original placement of art on its walls, but Frick’s major investment in paintings came only in the last decade of the century, after he had been living in the house for some years.
Nearly a decade later, changes in Frick’s professional and personal lives led to a second renovation of Clayton. In 1889, he became chairman of Carnegie Steel Company, and his increased salary and stature required a grander domicile. For this second renovation, Frick hired Frederick J. Osterling, an architect who had made his name working on residences or workplaces of Pittsburgh’s elite, such as Henry J. Heinz and George Westinghouse, whose famous companies were founded in the 1880s and ’90s. Osterling’s grandiose first proposal was rejected, but the finished house nonetheless contained many more rooms than before and its transformed exterior reflected the fashion for French Renaissance chateaux. What this designer brought to the revamped interior was greater unity of concept. The library’s oak woodwork, for example, was carved with a consistent vocabulary of motifs—urns and classical trophies—that drew on Italian Renaissance sources. The most accomplished of these spaces is the dining room, which, after a recent refurbishment, has been restored to its 1890s luster. In a harmonious ensemble of revival styles popularized by The Grammar of Ornament, Owen Jones’s 1856 bible of style, the decor joins furniture, stained-glass transoms, velvet curtains, and leather wall coverings in what the Germans term Gesamtkunstwerk, a unified artistic whole. Filling out the dining room were furnishings and tableware from the finest New York and London manufacturers. A. Kimbell & Co. provided eighteen dining chairs, more massive and baronial in feeling than Hess & Company’s simpler
and lighter predecessors (which were moved to the breakfast room). Porcelain plates and serving vessels for use on the table and display in the sideboards came from the British firms Minton, Copeland, Doulton, and Royal Worcester, through the New York purveyor Davis Collamore & Co. One of the first documented purchases for the renovated house is a set of W. T. Copeland & Sons plates centering birds in woodland scenes against cobalt blue and gilded surrounds. Some twenty years later, Frick’s New York mansion would be ornamented with eighteenth-century Sèvres, similarly rich but more technically refined and then still a rarity in America. Echoing the Copeland service, one of the New York sets was a Sèvres tea service (1767)—decorated by Antoine-Joseph Chapuis, who specialized in paintings of birds—and an important potpourri vase that also featured birds. Silver vessels and utensils from the American firms Gorham and Tiffany, alongside cut glass from England, Venice, and New York, completed the dining-room services.
Frick’s rapidly growing art collection soon filled Clayton’s sumptuous interiors. Around 1895, his enhanced status at the Carnegie Company and developing acumen as an art collector led to an explosion of painting purchases. Frick was truly becoming a collector, but the dining room’s wood paneling and built-in sideboard and glass cases left little wall space for hanging paintings. Early photographs reveal the profusion of framed works of art that filled the other rooms. By 1901, when the reception room was photographed, Frick’s propensity for hanging paintings by Barbizon School artists had overtaken his American works; at this point, he had the largest collection of this French School in Pittsburgh. Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de la Peña’s Pond of Vipers (Frick Pittsburgh) squeezes into the room, hanging over a door to the right of the fireplace. A Corot depiction of a peasant woman is to the left. The function of the room required comfortable seating, so Rococo-style upholstered chairs are provided. The French garniture brought from the Fricks’ Monongahela House apartment, still in keeping with this historicizing decor, shares the mantelpiece with contemporary English porcelain and glass. Works of art are beginning to overwhelm the rooms; it is no wonder that Frick was considering adding an art gallery to the house. The next urban house he built, the Fifth Avenue mansion in New York, would leave ample space for—in fact, privilege—the works of art, which mainly dated from earlier centuries. Historical—that is to say, actual eighteenth- century—chairs and chests of drawers would replace historicizing imitations.
Interestingly, the character of some rooms largely survived the move to New York. For example, the breakfast room at Clayton, with silk damasks lining walls hung with Barbizon School landscapes, was replicated in New York. Perhaps the Fricks felt that the comfort of this intimate dining room could not be bettered. The principal difference between the Pittsburgh and New York houses is that the later one was specifically designed to accommodate works of art, while neither the 1882 nor 1891 renovations of Clayton anticipated the large growth of Frick’s collection.
Tension between Frick’s desire for stylish houses and taste for avant-garde art came to a head with his commission of the trendy French artist Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret for a painting of Consolatrix Afflictorum [Comforter of the Afflicted], a religious subject Frick found emotionally appealing after the death of two
of his children. Yet the painting proved too large for the dining room, and many people were mystified by its style and subject. “Frick buys a freak,” blared the headline of a newspaper.13 The experience seems to have taught him a lesson about the perils of commissioning art specifically for a house. He repeated this rarely—notably with the decorative ceiling painting on the second floor of the New York mansion.
Ian Wardropper was Director of The Frick Collection from 2011 to 2025. He has written numerous books and articles and coorganized more than twenty exhibitions, among them, Bernini: Sculpting in Clay (2012) and Cast in Bronze: French Sculpturefrom Renaissance to Revolution (2009). In 2012, he received the prestigious award of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from France.
