The sculptor Malvina Hoffman knew the subject of this marble bust well. She recalled that about a decade before she carved it, Mr. Frick had visited her studio to view a bust of his daughter that he had commissioned. In studying his face, Hoffman had been struck by how sympathetic and unhurried he had seemed. "I felt it inevitable," she noted, "that I would one day do his portrait."
Henry Clay Frick was one of the most powerful and creative industrialists of the nineteenth century. He was born in 1849 on a farm in southwestern Pennsylvania. By the age of thirty, he had become a millionaire, as the leading supplier of coke to the growing steel industry of nearby Pittsburgh. His administrative skills impressed Andrew Carnegie, who invited him to become the manager of the vast Carnegie steel interests--the largest in the world. By 1900, the two men had fallen out. Mr. Frick, very rich with his settlement, could now turn to his private obsession--collecting great works of art--and establish his presence in New York City, along with his wife Adelaide Howard Childs, and their two children.
Mr. Frick's interest in art was apparent very early on. His first recorded purchase--in 1881--was a landscape by a Pittsburgh artist. By the time of his death in 1919, Henry Clay Frick was regarded as one of the most discriminating collectors of all time. Though he consulted scholars, dealers, and other collectors, he ultimately relied on his own taste.
