Building the House | Launch Slide Show!
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Construction of the Henry Clay Frick Residence, One East 70th Street, bird's eye view looking west. Photo by Wurts Brothers, July 2, 1913. |
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The conception, planning, and erection of Thomas Hastings’s Indiana limestone mansion were intimately connected to Henry Clay Frick’s ambition as an art collector. From the very beginning, the house was intended to serve as a museum — after the deaths of the founder and his wife — as a “public gallery to which the entire public shall forever have access.” During their lifetime, it was to provide the setting for Frick’s incomparable collection of Old Masters and nineteenth-century paintings. But the house was also a home to Frick, his wife, Adelaide, his daughter Helen Clay, whose bedrooms were located on the second floor of the building, and some twenty-seven servants who occupied rooms on the third floor.
In 1906 Frick acquired the Lenox Library building and site on Fifth Avenue between seventieth and seventy-first streets. Four months later, he added an additional parcel of land running some fifty feet east through the block. Frick was not able to take title to his latest acquisition until the “new Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street” had been completed.
Source: Colin B. Bailey, Building The Frick Collection: An Introduction to the House and Its Collections. New York: The Frick Collection in association with Scala Publishers, 2006 (available from the Museum Shop).
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