Word: fricks
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Those four years were spent on more than swapping pictures. The $5,000,000 that Frick gave Architects Carrere & Hastings went to build no museum but a palace for a conceited man. Trustees decided early that the house should, as much as possible, be kept as it was built "as a historic example of a rich man's home of the early 20th Century." But in order that people could circulate through it at all great changes had to be made...
Working on the problem from 9 a. m. to 5 p. m. daily, without even taking off her hat, Miss Frick first decided that warehouses were not safe enough for Frick pictures. Before any remodeling was done at all, a fireproof, burglarproof vault was dug in the basement of the house in which every treasure was moved. Then the vault was bricked up. Doors and corridors had to be rearranged. In order to install a modern air-conditioning system the panelling in several rooms had to be taken apart piecemeal and replaced. Eighteen ten-ton blocks of marble were quarried...
Before a citizen can see the Frick pictures, he must call, write or telephone to a special ticket office, tell not only the day but the hour that he wishes to tour the collection. Once admitted, he must follow a special strip of green carpet from room to room, never loitering, never turning back, never sitting down. At the end of an hour he will have had brief glimpses of $50,000,000 worth of pictures and will be ejected through the same oak door through which he entered...
...velvet cap. Other famed numbers include Titian's Man in a Red Cap, Titian's portrait of the bearded, obscene Pietro Aretino; Raeburn's portraits of James Cruickshank & wife; the immensely valuable St. Francis in Ecstacy by Giovanni Bellini; eleven Fragonard panels for which Frick reputedly paid J. P. Morgan more than...
Collector Frick paid more attention to the advice of experts than to his own taste but he did have a weakness for portraits. Two interested critics particularly. In the Oval room, flanked by Whistlers, hangs one of the greatest works of the world's greatest society portraitist-Velasquez's portrait of Philip IV" of Spain in a rose coat. This picture cost Frick $475,000. Round the corner hangs another portrait by another great countryman who for a time tried to paint in a way Velasquez did later, not realizing that he had spiritual gifts far greater than...