Portrait of Childs Frick as a Child

Childs Frick was almost two years old when the Fricks commissioned this portrait of him by Scottish artist James Archer. Archer traveled to the United States in 1884, and while here painted a portrait of Andrew Carnegie, Pittsburgh industrialist and business partner of Henry Clay Frick, and this portrait of Frick’s first born child.

The portrait shows Childs in a landscape, wearing the type of white dress that both boys and girls wore when very young. Archer has Childs holding a rose, which in the Victorian era language of flowers meant purity and grace. It was also used in American art as a symbol of fruitfulness and children and the continuation of the family line.