The book travels through the house room by room, even exploring the newly public second floor. It teaches a curator’s way of looking: succinctly and with clear guidance toward specifics that sharpen what one notices. Salomon frames the story through Henry Clay Frick’s own words—“a comfortable, well-arranged house, simple, in good taste, and not ostentatious”—then traces how Thomas Hastings and the decorator Sir Charles Allom turned that mandate into a home. Salomon’s chapters open with direct readings of spaces and their history before zeroing in on key works to demonstrate how architecture, art, and design lock together.
Frick acquired the eight panels that inspired this room from art dealer Joseph Duveen. The designs in the main cartouches depict children in the “allegorical guises of arts and sciences—Painting and Sculpture, Poetry and Music, Singing and Dancing, Comedy and Tragedy, Architecture and Chemistry, Astronomy and Hydraulics, Fishing and Hunting, and Fowling and Horticulture—and are based on designs by Boucher for Madame de Pompadour.”
Take the Boucher Room, for example. As Salomon explains, Frick built the room upstairs in 1916 around eight allegorical panels by François Boucher and his workshop. In the 1930s, the museum dismantled and relocated the room so visitors could see it downstairs. Post-renovation, Adelaide Childs Frick’s boudoir was reinstated in purpose and scale at its original location, fitted with rewoven curtains, refreshed French upholstery, Sèvres porcelain, and walls restored to “Mrs. Frick’s Green.”
Between the windows rest two marble busts by Jean-Antoine Houdan: Armand-Thomas Hue, Marquis de Miromesnil and Madame His.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Louise, Princesse de Broglie, Later the Comtesse d’Haussonville (1845), a portrait of the famed French essayist and biographer, hangs opposite the Romney painting.
Photo: Miguel Flores-Vianna
Another highlight is the Walnut Room, named for the walnut panels that wrap the room. Once Frick’s bedroom, where he died in 1919, the stately chamber served as the Board of Trustees’s regular meeting room for ninety years, until 2020. It was recently transformed into a gallery devoted to British and French portraiture from the 18th and 19th centuries. Notably, Frick’s beloved George Romney painting, Emma Hart, Lady Hamilton, as “Nature”, now hangs over the chimneypiece,returned to its original home after almost a century in the downstairs library. TheFrick Collection: The Historic Interiors, published by Rizzoli, is a source and keepsake in one.
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Discover The Frick Collection
The cover of the book, The Frick Collection: The Historic Interiors of One East Seventieth Street.
Photograph by Miguel Flores-Vianna
Modeled after grand English country houses, the oak-paneled Library centers on a posthumous portrait of Henry Clay Frick by John C. Johansen, hung where William Hoarth’s Miss Mary Edwards once presided in Frick’s time. The upper part of the chimneypiece is crowned by lime-wood floral garlands carved by Abraham Miller.
Photograph by Miguel Flores-Vianna
Waist-high bookshelves wrap all four walls to maximize space for art. Pictured here, Sarah, Lady Innes by Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) represents a transitional style between the high-society British artist’s earlier doll-like figuration and later more naturalistic portraits.
Photograph by Miguel Flores-Vianna
Virtually unchanged since 1919, the Dining Room again channels an English country house with painted pannelling, a Sir Charles Aloom chandelier, and British portrats. Gainsborough’s The Mall in St. James’s Park anchors the northern wall across from Frances Duncombe and Mrs. Baker.
Photograph by Miguel Flores-Vianna
The Fragonard Room is set around four (of fourteen owned by Frick) principle canvases by Jean-Honoré Fragonard collectively called The Progress of Love. Originally intended for the last mistress of France’s King XV in 1771, Madame du Barry rejected them before they later landed with Frick in 1915 via art dealer Joseph Duveen.
Photograph by Miguel Flores-Vianna
Inspired by English country house picture galleries, The West Gallery, at nearly 100-feet-long, was once the largest of its kind in New York. Designed around large skylights to illuminate paintings, the room features Frick’s Old Masters (i.e. El Greco, Velázquez, Goya, Veronese, Van Dyck, Turner). Frick ended most of his nights here, studying the paintings and napping on the sofa in front of the Velázquez portrait of King Philip IV of Spain.
Photograph by Miguel Flores-Vianna
Once Frick’s office, the skylit Oval Room stages full-length portraits. One of the museum’s most significant acquisitions (2017), a portrait of Camillo Borghese by François Gérard, rests on the central wall.
Photograph by Miguel Flores-Vianna
In the North Hall, Botticino Rosato marble-veneered walls hold French, Italian (both 1700s), and Dutch (1600s) portraits and landscapes.
Photograph by Miguel Flores-Vianna
Historically, this landing was the threshold to the family’s private second floor; later, to the museum’s private offices. While Renoir’s La Promenade moved from the right wall to a wall across from the breakfast room, Whistler’s Symphony in Grey and Green crowns the chimneypiece where Frick originally set it.
Photograph by Miguel Flores-Vianna
The room where the Frick family ate breakfast each morning was converted into office space when the mansion first became a museum. However, with the recent renovation, the Breakfast Room was reconfigured into its original form as it better demonstrates how the family lived in and interacted with the space.
Photograph by Miguel Flores-Vianna
The Breakfast Room now emphasizes Frick’s original 18th-century landscape paintings, rural scenes reminiscent of Frick’s upbringing in western Pennsylvania. The renovation hoped to convey how the family lived and functioned
