Blogs

Ars Longa is a blog series exploring lost, altered, and destroyed works of art that are preserved in the records of the Frick's Photoarchive. In this post, the Photoarchive helps us uncover the complex history of a painting by the circle of Peter Paul Rubens, two separate panels of which today reside in two different museums.

Co-sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art and the Frick Art Reference Library, this upcoming four-part symposium examines the connections between science, technology, and art history. Read more for a preview of the important topics under consideration, including what technological advances might benefit the study of art in the near future.

Helen Sanger (1923–2020), the Frick Art Reference Library’s first Andrew W. Mellon Chief Librarian, passed away in July at the age of 96. Her forty-seven-year career at the library shaped the institution profoundly, and her legacy lives on in many areas of its initiatives.

In this installment of Untold Histories, explore the relics of the Fricks' extensive annunciator system. This network of call bells connected the family to its staff and offers a glimpse into the rhythms of domestic service at 1 East 70th Street.

Housekeeper Minerva Stone is integral to the story of those who kept the Fricks’ Gilded Age home running. Though no personal accounts survive, we can paint a picture of Stone’s larger biography, lending context to the years she spent at the crossroads of her employer’s immense wealth and majority-immigrant staff.

The Frick's beloved Mistress and Maid (1666–67) by Johannes Vermeer poses many unanswered questions, notably its seemingly unfinished background. A recent technical study in collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Doerner Institut uncovers important new information about the painting, one of only thirty-six works attributed to the artist. 

Would you like to save and share your favorite works of art from The Frick Collection? Do you have a unique idea for a themed online collection? You can do all these things using My Collections.

In this entry, we meet Minerva Stone, who occupied the post of housekeeper for nearly the entire time Henry Clay Frick lived at 1 East 70th Street. Stone oversaw the management of the family’s new home with meticulous attention to detail, eventually becoming the second highest-paid member of the household staff.

Web archiving is the process of collecting web-based content with a web crawler and preserving the content in an archival format. The Frick Art Reference Library is currently involved in a project to capture and preserve the online-only content of New York City galleries.

The debut post of "Untold Histories" introduces the behind-the-scenes staff of the Frick residence, a private home from 1914–31. Associate Museum Educator Caitlin Henningsen considers what remains of this domestic life in the museum today and examines the 1915 state census entry that inspired this ongoing project.