This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to New York
I’ve always felt guiltily grateful to robber barons like Henry Clay Frick who offset their cruelty and rapaciousness with gifts that we continue to enjoy. Frick had better taste than his capitalist rivals and, though they all consulted the dealer Joseph Duveen, scoured Europe for art and scooped up English portraits and Old Masters, he was the one who left a collection that rivals the Metropolitan Museum in quality, if not in breadth. I was bereft when the Fifth Avenue mansion closed for renovations in 2020, although it was exciting, even revelatory, to see all those masterworks in exile at the incongruously modern Breuer building at 75th and Madison. Fortunately, the original Frick will reopen in April 2025, expanded, reconfigured and restored, and I’ll be able to see my personal roster of friends again in the intimate, domestic surroundings where they belong.
‘St Francis in the Desert’ (c1475–80) by Giovanni Bellini
My favourite painting in a collection rich with wonders is a rendering of bliss so intense it leaves a mark. Francis emerges from his cosy den to greet a morning that is glorious just by virtue of its existence. You can feel the sweet clarity of the air and warmth of sunlight on the saint’s face; he barely notices the stigmata. The panel’s theatrical allure makes it easy to miss the details: a shepherd and his flock patrolling the riverbank, a watchful heron balancing on a rock, a rabbit poking out of a burrow. This religious work strikes me as almost carnal in its depiction of earthly delight. Living Hall
‘Thomas More’ (1527) and ‘Thomas Cromwell’ (date unknown) by Hans Holbein the Younger
Holbein painted both the powerful Thomases who vied for Henry VIII’s favour and fell victim to his lethal whims — a privilege that keeps them locked together in posterity as they were in life. More’s face competes for attention with his outfit, but his pensive expression, sombre eyes and colossal nose finally win out over the riotous red-velvet sleeves. Cromwell, in profile, betrays his Kissingerian ruthlessness. The brow knots in a sceptical grimace, and multiple chins disappear into a fur collar. By placing the man behind a table covered in velvet and strewn with an administrator’s deluxe appurtenances, Holbein gives us a portrait of quiet, fearsome power. Living Hall
‘The Polish Rider’ (c1655) by Rembrandt van Rijn
I was a teenager when I first fell for this fine-featured boy with flowing hair, galloping through a misty landscape. And his allure hasn’t dimmed. The poet Frank O’Hara felt it too when he wrote “Having a Coke with You” more than 60 years ago: “I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world / except possibly for ‘The Polish Rider’ occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick / which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time.” Those lines evoke the renewable sensual shock of seeing that picture over and over again. West Gallery
‘Comtesse d’Haussonville’ (1845) by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
A sharp realist with a diamond-honed line, Ingres knew when to leave literalism behind, and in this portrait he did justice to the sitter’s aura rather than her appearance. “I was destined to beguile, to attract, to seduce, and in the final reckoning to cause suffering in all those who sought their happiness in me,” the pale countess wrote. Bedecked in a shimmering blue silk that matches her eyes, endowed with translucent skin and rubbery limbs (plus an errant finger that appears, impossibly, in the mirror), she glows as a graceful paragon of youth. Not trusting Ingres to get the job right, she also left instructions to have her remains embalmed, so that both her fleshly and artistic bodies could endure. Walnut Room, Second Floor
‘Arrangement in Black and Gold: Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fézensac’ (1891-92) by James Abbott McNeill Whistler
Whistler’s dark lord provided raw material for three distinct literary characters (Proust’s decadent aesthete Baron de Charlus, Jean des Esseintes, the debauched hero of Huysmans’ À rebours, and Wilde’s evil narcissist, Dorian Gray), as well as this inky tour de force. In Whistler’s vision, the celebrated dandy merges with the gloom, so that he seems to be coalescing and vanishing at the same time. With his fine charcoal suit, spiky moustache and brow of moonlike pallor, the glamorous count projects a self-possession so chilly he seems practically sociopathic. Oval Room
‘Lady with a Bird Organ’ (c1751) by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin
This woman stands out among the opulently clad tycoons, potentates and heiresses whose portraits populate The Frick. That’s because she is a nobody — or, rather, an anybody — sitting beside the window. It’s a scene of comfortable captivity, the subject in her snug parlour and voluminous dress, the bird in its corner and its cage. The two are linked by the serinette, an organ used to teach canaries new tunes. Human and avian share confined quarters and a similar fate, able to sing and be admired, but not to roam. Boucher Anteroom, Second Floor
‘Cloud Study’ (c1822) by John Constable
Frick owned not one, but two genius canvases by Constable: “Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Garden” and “The White Horse”. But my eye is drawn to a pair of much smaller oil sketches on paper that the museum acquired in 2000. Constable made them when he went “skying”: training his eye, hand and heart on the atmosphere’s constant motion. He aimed for a seamless melding of feeling and fact, and the resulting studies are at once impromptu and meticulous, scientific and expressive — permanent records of nature’s fleeting phenomena. Small Hallway, Second Floor
‘The Pond’ (1868-70) by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
A woman and a child dawdle by the shallows of a country pool. Behind them, a cow sips from its placid waters and beyond that, a cosy cottage nestles invitingly on a slope. The gossamer scene is suffused by an atmosphere so dense it’s almost liquid, and the breeze rustles through air dotted with shimmering points of light. Frick was drawn to Corot’s elegiac late work, which leaned away from naturalism and towards half-lit reverie. He conjured these landscapes from memory rather than painting in plein-air, and his term for them, “souvenirs”, hints at their wistfulness. West Gallery
‘Julia, Lady Peel’ (1827) by Sir Thomas Lawrence
Her plumed red hat beckons from afar. Up close, the effortlessly brushed details entice and captivate. This portrait yields no depth — everything is on the sparkling surface, where Lawrence applied paint like butter on toast. Let your eye graze across the marmoreal hands to glistering jewels, through the satin of her sleeve to the plum mantle lined with fluffy white fur and, finally, to the hint of a landscape at the at the very edge of the frame. Zoom in on that spot, and you might mistake it for a 20th-century abstraction. Julia’s husband was the distinguished politician Sir Robert Peel, but she too contributed to the nation’s glory simply by sitting for this portrait, which launched her into the pantheon of painted beauties. Library
‘The Bullfight’ (1864) by Édouard Manet
Manet had never been to Spain when he conjured a tragic afternoon in a plaza de toros. Critics sneered at his fantasy, ignoring its creamy impasto and focusing on the off-kilter proportions. “A wooden bullfighter, killed by a horned rat,” one wag quipped. The artist responded by slicing the canvas in two. The lower section became “The Dead Toreador” (now in Washington’s National Gallery). Frick got the upper portion, a bizarrely composed but gripping amalgam of elements. The arena’s wooden fence divides a muddy jumble of spectators from three brightly costumed figures and a barely visible sliver of bull. When Manet eventually did travel to Spain and attend a corrida, he found it “one of the most beautiful, strangest and terrible spectacles one could see”. But he already knew that, since he had seen it in his mind. Impressionist Room, Second Floor
The Frick, 1 East 70th Street, New York, NY 10021, reopens in April 2025
Which of these 10 paintings at The Frick do you like the best, and why? Tell us in the comments below. And follow FT Globetrotter on Instagram at @FTGlobetrotter
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