Blogs

To enhance the discoverability of Photoarchive materials, the library launched a collaboration with the Center for Advanced Research of Spatial Information at Hunter College, City University of New York in 2014 to develop an interactive digital map that traces the movement of library staff and photographers as they traveled across the United States and recorded paintings and sculptures in private homes and little-known public collections.

This [painting] annihilates time as far as poor mortals may. —William Carlos Williams on Titian’s Portrait of a Man in a Red Hat

Christopher Snow Hopkins, Assistant Editor, looks closely at the barefoot cave dweller in Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert: “The forest was his chapel, the birds his parishioners.”

Mikhail Shklyarevsky, Acquisitions Assistant, Frick Art Reference Library, observes that the stern countenance of the sitter in Van Dyck’s portrait of Frans Snyders is the look of a person who has gained wisdom through hardship.

Payton Goad, Executive Assistant, Frick Art Reference Library, vowed to work with Old Masters after seeing Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl when she was a senior in college: “In my eyes, nothing else could compare.”

Lorenzo De Los Angeles III, Reference Assistant, Frick Art Reference Library, considers the French seventeenth-century bronze Hercules and the Hydra in the context of the 1963 sci-fi flick Jason and the Argonauts.

Isabel Losada, Manager for Membership, didn’t hesitate when asked during a job interview, “What work of art best illustrates your work ethic?” Her answer: Goya’s depiction of three metalworkers engaging in intense labor.

Liz Daly, Community Relations Manager, had an epiphany some years ago while looking at El Greco’s St. Jerome: That guy looks exactly like Samuel Beckett.

Monica Sands, Sales Associate, Retail and Visitor Services, imagines her parents stopping to look at Vermeer's Officer and Laughing Girl during a blind date at The Frick Collection in the mid-1950s.

Tommy Mishima, Museum Shop Inventory Coordinator, recalls seeing Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait in a children’s encyclopedia when he was eight years old. Ten years later, he came face-to-face with the painting for the first time.