The Frick Collection

Henry Clay Frick made his fortune in coke and steel, as a partner of Andrew Carnegie and one of the harder men in American industry. Near the end of his life he built a mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York to hold the old master paintings he had been buying, and he arranged that once his family was gone it would become a public museum, kept as a home rather than a gallery.

That is still the effect. Vermeers, a Bellini "St. Francis in the Desert," a Rembrandt and a Holbein hang in wood-paneled rooms around a skylit garden court, without labels crowding them, as though the owner had just stepped out. The house recently closed for its first major renovation in nearly ninety years and reopened in 2025, this time opening the family's private second floor to visitors for the first time. The paintings still hang where Frick meant them to, in the rooms he actually lived in.