Portrait of Mr. Frick in West Gallery

Painted a few years after Henry Clay Frick’s death in 1919, this stately portrait shows the collector in the West Gallery of his 1 East 70th Street home. Frick stands in front of a table lined with bronzes purchased from the Morgan Collection. Behind him hang two Old Master portraits of Renaissance-era nobility-Velázquez’s King Philip IV of Spain (1644) and El Greco’s Vincenzo Anastagi (c. 1571). Both paintings remain on view in the West Gallery today. Like J. P. Morgan, Frick spent years of his life and millions of his fortune assembling and refining his collection, which opened to the public in 1935.