Frick Family Photographs

The Frick Family Photographs collection consists of images dating from circa 1850s through the 1980s. Items range from formal studio portraits to snapshots, published images, and souvenir photographs, and include a variety of photographic formats and processes (e.g. cartes de visites, tintypes, cased images, albumen prints, cyanotypes, etc.) These images document the Frick family's social circle, hobbies, modes of dress and travel, residences, employees, and pets. Photographers of note include B.L.H. Dabbs, Ernest Walter Histed, Henry Havelock Pierce, and F. Roseti, among many others. Items are grouped into the following six series:

Series I: People, circa 1850s-1989 and undated, chiefly contains images of Frick family members, friends, and other acquaintances. The bulk of these images depict Henry Clay Frick and his wife Adelaide H.C. Frick, along with their children, Childs Frick, Helen Clay Frick, Martha Howard Frick, and Henry Clay Frick Jr. Extended family members represented in this series include Mr. and Mrs. Frick's parents, siblings, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, as well as nieces, nephews, and cousins. Members of the Childs, Overholt, Blanchard, Burden, and Symington families are among the extended family members documented here. This series also includes a wide range of friends and acquaintances of the Frick family, such as P.C. Knox and George Harvey, as well as members of the Carnegie, Frew, and Holmes families. This series occasionally includes historically prominent people (e.g. Mark Twain, or Queen Wilhelmina of The Netherlands), who are not known to have any acquaintance with the family. Items in this series are arranged alphabetically by the subject's name, with unidentified images filed at the end.

Series II: Places, circa 1867-1989 and undated, contains images of Frick family residences and of places associated with the family, including locations in and around Pittsburgh, and homes belonging to friends and extended family. This series also documents travel both within the United States and abroad, and includes snapshots taken by family members, as well as published and souvenir photographs. Residences of the Frick family documented in this series include Clayton in Pittsburgh, Pa., Eagle Rock in Prides Crossing, Mass., and One East 70th Street in New York, N.Y. This series does not contain any images of the Vanderbilt house at 640 Fifth Avenue in New York, which the Fricks leased from 1905 until 1914. Items in this series are grouped first by foreign and domestic locations. Foreign locations are arranged alphabetically by country and then city; domestic locations are arranged alphabetically by state and then city.

Series III: Art Objects, 1932-circa 1970s and undated, contains images of paintings, sculpture, clocks, enamels, furniture, porcelains, and rugs. The bulk of the photographs in this series depict objects in The Frick Collection; some of the remaining images are of objects at the Frick Art & Historical Center, while still others are in unidentified collections. Items in this series are grouped into Subseries I: Works in The Frick Collection and Subseries II: Other Works. Within each subseries, photographs are arranged first by genre then by artist. Items such as furniture, where the artist or maker may not be known, are organized by type (e.g. sofas, tables, etc.)

Series IV: Rolls of Film, 1903-1986 and undated, are groups of photographs, presumably from a single roll of film, that variously depict people and places, but do not fit squarely within Series I: People or Series II: Places above. Many of these include images taken at the Frick family's country estate (Eagle Rock) in Prides Crossing, Mass., at Helen Clay Frick's estate (Westmoreland Farm) in Bedford, N.Y., or on various trips to Europe. Folder titles within this series are often taken from notes on the envelopes in which the photographs were housed. Items in this series are arranged chronologically.

Series V: Miscellaneous, circa 1900-1969 and undated, chiefly includes images of animals, automobiles, flowers, and a large group of stereoscopic views of golf swings published by the Bay State Publishing Co. Animals depicted in this series largely consist of horses and dogs owned by the Frick family over the years, while images of automobiles depict cars owned by Henry Clay Frick in the early 1900s. Items in this series are grouped alphabetically by subject.

Series VI: Negatives, dating from the early 1900s through the 1980s, depict people, places, art objects, and miscellaneous subjects much as the photographic prints in Series I through V do above. For preservation purposes, however, all negatives have been physically removed from this collection and placed in cold storage. Digital surrogates are available for these items; please see the archivist or email archives@frick.org for more details.

Series VII: Cased Images and Special Formats, circa 1868-1920 and undated, contains images in frames, cases, or other enclosures that require them to be housed separately. These include portraits of Adelaide H.C. Frick, Helen Clay Frick, and Frances Frick Burden by Alyn Williams, founder of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters, Sculptors, and Gravers; two portraits of Henry Clay Frick as a young man; and gold lacquer reprints by H. Mizuno of an 1894 portrait of Frick. Grouped at the end of the series are 119 lantern slides of works of art in The Frick Collection, followed by stereoviews probably taken by Helen Clay Frick of Westmoreland Farm, her estate in Bedford, N.Y.