Manhattan Masters (Engels)

quentin buvelot

MANHATTAN MASTERS

DUTCH PAINTINGS FROM THE FRICK COLLECTION

Mauritshuis The Hague

Waanders Publishers Zwolle

This publication accompanies the exhibition Manhattan Masters Mauritshuis, The Hague 29 September 2022 through 15 January 2023

The exhibition was generously sponsored by

American Friends of the Mauritshuis Johan Maurits Compagnie Foundation Friends of the Mauritshuis Foundation Turing Foundation Mondriaan Fund

Marjon Ornstein Fund The Netherland-America Foundation Bloomberg Philanthropies

This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands on behalf of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.

Foreword

Word of Thanks

A Country House in New York City

henry clay frick, entrepreneur and art collector

The Life of Henry Clay Frick, 1849-1919

Old Masters, New World: Frick’s Rival Collectors

frick & the dutch landscape

frick & rembrandt

frick & vermeer

frick & hals

Literature and Sources 30 44 67 81 89 96 98 103

A Visit to the Mauritshuis

Provenance of Paintings in the Exhibition

‘Larger than life’ describes the gesture made by Ian Wardropper, the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Director of The Frick Collection. Two years ago he promised to lend ten Dutch paintings to the Mauritshuis. The resulting exhibition, Manhattan Masters – prepared by my esteemed predecessor, Emilie Gordenker – concludes our bicentennial celebrations. For those who might be unaware of this, The Frick Collection (‘The Frick’ for short) does not normally lend these works. This was the wish of Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919), who stipulated in his will that his New York residence, housing most of his outstanding art collection, should be open to the public as a museum bearing his name. In 2015 the Mauritshuis exhibited a choice selection of works from The Frick, but those objects had not been purchased by Frick himself and were therefore not subject to the terms of his will. The present exhibition has been made possible by The Frick’s current renovations, for the duration of which most of the collection has been transferred to the former premises of the Whitney Museum on Madison Avenue, under the name The Frick Madison. First-rate pieces from the collection are also on display elsewhere. Earlier this year, for example, Rembrandt’s famous Polish Rider (fig. p. 70) returned temporarily to King Stanisław August’s palace in Warsaw, where it hung some 200 years ago.

Wardropper’s gesture is uniquely bound up with the long-standing friendship between The Frick Collection and the Mauritshuis, museums that resemble each other in a number of ways. Both collections are world-famous and are housed in former residences, where the artworks are displayed in an atmosphere that is less like a public museum and more like a private home – even if those homes are richly appointed, stately mansions.

Moreover, visitors to these museums realise that they have experienced something very exciting, because afterwards they still have energy to burn. This stands to reason, for in a limited amount of time they have encountered, at close quarters, collections of magical highlights of art history.

Larger than life: these words certainly apply to one of the ten works that have travelled to The Hague: the life-size self-portrait that Rembrandt painted in 1658. Together with Quentin Buvelot – the curator of Manhattan Masters – I visited The Frick in preparation for this exhibition. Naturally our mouths began to water at the sight of masterpieces by Hals and Vermeer. When we arrived at Rembrandt’s self-portrait, Quentin folded his hands and said reverently: ‘Oh, yes.’ I had remembered that it was an impressive painting, but in all honesty, I was not prepared for the overwhelming effect it had on me. The sight of this self-portrait filled me with the same feelings I had experienced the first time I saw it. Rembrandt surpasses himself as both painter and sitter: it is as though this is no longer a work of art, but something altogether different. At the risk of sounding airy-fairy, I would venture to say that Rembrandt’s soul is present in this painting. He seems to live and breathe. For centuries this work has enchanted not only me but millions of others too. This also emerges from the extraordinary enthusiasm with which a sponsor spontaneously announced: ‘If Rembrandt’s self-portrait in The Frick Collection comes to the Mauritshuis, we will pay for its transport!’ – a most generous and welcome offer. I would like to thank the sponsors who made this exhibition possible: the American Friends of the Mauritshuis, the Johan Maurits Compagnie Foundation, the Friends of the Mauritshuis Foundation, the Turing Foundation, the

Mondriaan Fund, the Marjon Ornstein Fund, the Netherland-America Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies. This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands on behalf of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.

In this book Quentin Buvelot discusses the oneway flow of important artworks from Europe to the United States around 1900. Practically overnight, the Netherlands and other European countries yielded up countless art treasures to American collectors. Should the Dutch have kept a closer eye on their possessions? In fact, it seems that American collecting practices, which caused large numbers of masterpieces to leave the Continent at breakneck speed, actually stimulated cultural preservation in the Netherlands. This exhibition is indeed a windfall, for never before have these works, acquired by Frick himself, returned to the Netherlands, their native country. The unlikelihood of their ever returning again makes this exhibition a once-in-alifetime opportunity.

During the preparation of Manhattan Masters, another important painting, not coincidentally by Rembrandt, returned to the Netherlands for good: The Standard Bearer, which will be on display at the Mauritshuis from 1 to 30 November. Its high price sparked much debate about the decision to purchase this work, but it is quite possible that in a couple of decades, or even sooner, this discussion will have been forgotten, and we will simply be happy about the return of our prodigal painting. But even if it were possible, would we want all the Old Master expats to return to the Netherlands? No, because they serve as ambassadors for the arts of our country, and also because we wish the entire

world the pleasure of engaging with Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century. There is, however, one all-important message that Manhattan Masters and the return of Rembrandt’s Standard Bearer have brought to us: let us cherish our cultural heritage. Human beings come and go, but these paintings will survive us.

martine gosselink General Director Mauritshuis, The Hague

When the Mauritshuis was renovated several years ago, we lent numerous highlights of our collection to The Frick Collection in New York. That exhibition, Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis, ran from 22 October 2013 to 19 January 2014. The selection consisted of fifteen paintings, ranging from Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and Simeon’s Song of Praise by Rembrandt to Coorte’s Still Life with Five Apricots and Fabritius’s Goldfinch. It was a resounding success for The Frick, with the highest attendance figures in the history of the museum. The Mauritshuis subsequently mounted the 2015 exhibition The Frick Collection: Art Treasures from New York, a choice selection of thirty-six paintings and other objects, all acquired after 1919, the year of Frick’s death. Never before had The Frick let so many artworks travel to another venue. The public showed its appreciation: more than 117,000 visitors were welcomed to the exhibition between 5 February and 10 May, and Ingrès’s portrait of the Comtesse d’Haussonville was clearly their favourite.

We have now come full circle with the arrival of ten seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, all but one purchased by Frick himself. Apart from the Ruisdael, acquired by the Trustees in 1949, the selected works have not been seen in Europe since being shipped to the United States a century ago. Rembrandt’s self-portrait of 1658, for example, one of the artist’s most impressive self-portraits, was last seen in Europe in 1899, in an exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. What a unique opportunity to see it now in The Hague, back in the Netherlands for the first time since it was recorded in 1815 in the possession of the Earls of Ilchester (see p. 100, no. 6). For me personally, Manhattan Masters is a dream come true. I hope that visitors to the exhibition will

Preparatory to this publication, I had long discussions with the Dutch-born art historian Esmée Quodbach, an expert on provenance research and the history of collecting Dutch and Flemish paintings, who lives in Princeton, New Jersey. She was previously active at The Frick’s Center for the History of Collecting. Esmée told me about the history of Henry Clay Frick’s collection. Her many articles on his exceptional art holdings, included in the list of literature at the back of the book, formed the point of departure for the present publication. It was Esmée who sent me the passage (in an e-mail of 21 July 2021) in which Abraham Bredius, former director of the Mauritshuis, described Rembrandt’s self-portrait in such glowing terms: ‘Crowning everything we had just seen was the Frick Collection in its ideally situated [country house] on the sea, an hour from here. What a pleasure it was to revisit Lord Ilchester’s self-portrait of Rembrandt, the self-portrait of the master, that almost largerthan-life portrait of the painter, seated, his right hand leaning on a maulstick, looking at you with an expression of perfectly justified self-worth, so that one is left speechless, “every inch a king,” I once wrote about it’ (see further p. 71). Bredius would have been delighted to see this unforgettable painting temporarily on display next to the Rembrandts that he acquired for his private collection and bequeathed to the Mauritshuis in 1946 (fig. p. 68). Interestingly, the Old Woman with a Bible of around 1655-1660, which Frick himself acquired as a work by Rembrandt, is presented in the exhibition under the name of Carel van der Pluym, one of the master’s pupils. Shortly of

agree with me when I say that the narrow bounds of the selection are its very strength. Who could tire of looking at Rembrandt’s self-portrait, Hals’s nearly contemporaneous portrait of a man, or Vermeer’s intriguing painting of two figures in an interior?

after Frick had purchased this painting, Bredius informed him of this revised attribution, as emerges from the correspondence preserved in the archives of The Frick Collection (see p. 73). I would also like to thank Sander Paarlberg, curator at the Dordrechts Museum, whom I consulted about the attribution of the three paintings by Aelbert Cuyp in The Frick Collection.

Particularly worthy of mention is the smoothness of our collaboration with The Frick Collection. The Mauritshuis is greatly indebted to Xavier Salomon, Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, who contributed significantly to the success of this project. We are also grateful to the staff of The Frick Collection, especially Heidi Rosenau, Associate Director of Communications & Marketing; Bailey Keiger, Executive Assistant to the Chief Curator; and the staff of both The Frick Art Reference Library and The Frick Archives, in particular Julie Ludwig.

I owe a special word of thanks to my colleagues at the Mauritshuis, particularly Edwin Buijsen, Head of Collections and Research; Faye Cliné, registrar; Boy van den Hoorn, Technical Manager; Daphne Martens, intern; Hedwig Wösten, Exhibitions Manager. I am also indebted to Jelena Stefanovic (Studio OTW) and Sappho Pannhuysen (Studio Vrijdag) for the fairly restrained but very thoughtful design of the exhibition, and to Marloes Waanders, publisher, and Gert Jan Slagter, for the elegant design of this book and pleasant collaboration. Last but certainly not least, I would like to applaud Diane Webb for her smooth translation of this publication, working under time constraints and strict deadlines. This publication is dedicated in loving memory to my recently deceased parents, Henk Buvelot (19312022) and Anna Buvelot-Bos (1934-2022).

This book discusses Frick’s Dutch paintings as part of the larger story of the genesis and evolution of his collection, amassed in the Gilded Age. In the decades before and after 1900, the wealthiest Americans vied to collect the finest art treasures of Europe. Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century were highly sought after by Frick and other American collectors. Both the exhibition and this publication illuminate the vicissitudes of old paintings and the exciting works of art that turned up on the international art market at the turn of the twentieth century.

quentin buvelot Senior Curator Mauritshuis, The Hague

A COUNTRY HOUSE IN NEW YORK CITY

The unsurpassed holdings of The Frick Collection in New York can be found at 1 East 70th Street, the former home of the wealthy collector Henry Clay Frick (18491919) of Pittsburgh. The building, designed by the American architect Thomas Hastings (1860-1929), was erected in 1913-1914. Situated between Madison Avenue and 5th Avenue, this freestanding mansion, with its neoclassical architecture and splendid view of Central Park, recalls European buildings of the eighteenth century. Its rooms are also reminiscent of French and English interiors of that period.

Upon his rather unexpected death in 1919, Frick left the house and almost all the art he had acquired in four decades of collecting to the public, along with an endowment of $15 million. His widow, Adelaide Howard Childs Frick, remained in residence until her death on 4 October 1931. The premises were placed under the supervision of a Board of Trustees, an organisational structure that is

still common in American museums.

Frick stipulated in his last will and testament of 24 June 1915 that his museum was to be ‘for the use and benefit of all persons whomsoever’.

The Board of Trustees was given the task of managing and expanding the existing collection. Frick also wanted the museum to be a centre for the study of art and culture. His daughter Helen Clay Frick (1888-1984), the apple of his eye, took his wish to heart and in 1920 founded the unrivalled Frick Art Reference Library (fig. p. 97). This library, housed in a separate building, is similar in conception to the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD) in The Hague, although it focuses on both European and American art.

After the residence was repurposed as a museum by the well-known architect John Russell Pope (18731937), it opened its doors in December 1935 and welcomed 135,000 visitors in its very first year. Owing in part to the growth of the collection, the existing

building was enlarged in 1977. It was given a new reception hall (with a cloakroom and a shop) and exhibition galleries. A surprising addition was a garden on the 70th Street side of the building, designed by the Englishman Russell Page (1906-1985).

Now this historic building is once again undergoing renovation and expansion, this time under the supervision of Selldorf Architects. The collection is housed temporarily in the former home of the Whitney Museum on Madison Avenue, an iconic building dating from 1966 that was designed by the Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer (1902-1981). It is possible to visit The Frick Madison via the museum’s website, which also has a link to the building at 1 East 70th Street.

←

The house under construction, May 1913 → Rendering of The Frick Collection from 70th Street, New York (with thanks to Selldorf Architects)

HENRY CLAY FRICK, ENTREPRENEUR AND ART COLLECTOR

In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, a number of American families became extremely rich practically overnight (see p. 35). They earned their fortunes by investing, for example, in the construction of railways, the mining industry and the production of rubber. Henry Clay Frick (18491919), one of these great captains of industry, owed his enormous wealth to his business ventures in the coal and steel industry and to other extremely profitable investments. Frick was not highly educated, but from a very young age he was good with numbers. His mathematical aptitude proved useful in his job as bookkeeper for the family business, a whisky distillery in West Overton, Pennsylvania.

Frick, a born entrepreneur, was barely twenty when he realised that the large amounts of coal in his native soil could prove highly valuable to the burgeoning iron and steel industry. The production of metal required coke, which was obtained by heating coal at high temperatures in a process called thermal distillation. Frick borrowed some money, bought a number of large coal fields, and had fifty coke ovens built in 1871. It took only ten years for the H. C. Frick Coke Company to dominate the evergrowing steel industry in Pittsburgh, thus giving Frick his nickname: the ‘Coke King’. By 1879, at only thirty years of age, he was a millionaire. Two years later, in 1881, he became a joint-owner of his family’s whisky distillery – for sentimental reasons.

In the same period, in April 1881, Henry Clay Frick met his future wife, Adelaide Howard Childs Frick (1859-1931). The enamoured couple married on 15 December of that same year in Pittsburgh. Ada and Clay, as they called each other, lived in Pittsburgh from 1883 to 1905, in a mansion called Clayton. In the autumn of 1905 the family moved for good to New York City. They lived temporarily in a house built for William Vanderbilt at 640 Fifth Avenue, between 51st and 52nd Street, until their own house was finished in late 1914 (pp. 14-15). Of the couple’s four children – Childs Frick (b. 1883), Martha Howard Frick (1885), Helen Clay Frick (1888) and Henry Clay Frick Jr. (1892) – only Childs and Helen reached adulthood. Martha died in 1891, after a long illness; Henry Clay Frick Jr. died in infancy. Childs and Helen were the founding trustees of The Frick Collection.

Even before marrying Ada, Frick had begun to collect paintings, as one of the last of the Gilded Age collectors to do so (see pp. 38-41). The first artwork he ever purchased remains guesswork. According to old sources, he became interested in art at a very young age. It is said that, as a teenager, he decorated the walls of his room in Pittsburgh with prints and sketches, a few of which he had possibly drawn himself. A note written in 1871 by an assistant of Thomas Mellon, the financier of Frick’s first company, clearly shows that Frick not only worked hard, but also took an early interest in paintings:

‘Lands good, ovens well built; manager on job all day, keeps books evening, may be a little too enthusiastic about pictures but not enough to hurt; knows his business down to the ground; advise making the loan’. The twenty-two-year-old Frick was given the loan he requested and had fifty more ovens built.

In June 1880, Frick – still a young bachelor – and three of his friends went on a Grand Tour of Europe; it was the first time he had crossed the ocean. One of his travelling companions was Andrew W. Mellon (see p. 41), who would also become an important collector. (Frick earned a great deal of his fortune thanks to loans from Andrew’s father, the previously mentioned Thomas Mellon.) Together the friends saw the sights and visited the museums of Great Britain, Ireland, Italy and France. Sir Richard Wallace’s unsurpassed collection of Old Masters in London is said to have made a particularly deep impression on them, and allegedly motivated both Frick and Mellon to form high-quality collections of their own. It is worthy of mention that years later, in 1897, Wallace’s widow donated the art collection to the British state. Three years later, Hertford House, the family’s former residence, opened its doors to

the public as a museum: The Wallace Collection. This notable event could not have escaped Frick’s notice, and may well have influenced his decision to have his own collection opened to the public after his death. His friend George Harvey made explicit mention of Frick’s London experience in his rather uncritical biography of the collector, Henry Clay Frick: The Man, which appeared in 1928. For that matter, Mellon, too, resolved to bequeath his paintings to the state; in 1937 his collection became the basis of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

Frick did not pay large sums for art at first, and his collection therefore had rather modest beginnings. The earliest documented purchase of a painting dates from February 1881, when Frick paid an art dealer $260 for a river landscape completed the year before by George Hetzel (1826-1899). Hetzel was popular in those days, and he was active in Pittsburgh, where his work had been exhibited. After marrying that same year, Frick occasionally bought paintings from contemporary artists, both American and European, many of them fairly minor masters.

Clayton, Frick’s Pittsburgh residence

Adelaide Frick, with Childs, Helen and Martha, 1888

The contact with his neighbour, Joseph Woodwell (1842-1911), a prosperous entrepreneur who was also active as a painter, is thought to have exerted a great influence on the young Frick. Woodwell, who had taken lessons from Hetzel, the maker of the above-mentioned river landscape, might have advised Frick to acquire that painting. Woodwell told the budding collector about his stay with several painters of Barbizon, a village near the Forest of Fontainebleau in the vicinity of Paris. These French landscape painters were very popular with Frick and other American collectors, as were such contemporary artists as William Bouguereau and Jean-Charles Cazin. Frick bought numerous paintings by these artists, although later on he disposed of them or exchanged them for other works, as incipient collectors often do.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Frick was still buying paintings by Barbizon artists from European art dealers, as well as acquiring works by contemporary French artists from both European and American dealers. The usually taciturn Frick wrote about these acquisitions in September 1895 to a friend, a fellow industrialist: ‘The pictures I purchased abroad have all arrived, are hung on our walls, and we are getting a great deal of pleasure out of them. It seems to me better to have a certain amount of such things than the same value in bonds in the Safe Deposit Company, as you can draw your dividend daily.’ A month later Frick reiterated the fact that paintings gave him great pleasure when he wrote: ‘I get more real pleasure out of this than anything that I have ever engaged in, outside of business.’

The purchase in 1899 of the Portrait of aYoung Artist, then still attributed to Rembrandt (pp. 76-

The Great Gallery in Hertford House, London (now The Wallace Collection), c.1890.

This collection was a source of inspiration to Frick and other American collectors.

George Hetzel, River Landscape, 1880. Canvas, 114 x 76 cm. The Frick Pittsburgh.

philips wouwerman

THE CAVALRY CAMP, c .1660-1665 Panel, 43 x 53 cm. The Frick Collection, New York

The Haarlem painter Philips Wouwerman (1619-1688) made his name as a painter of horses. He was unrivalled in capturing the characteristic attitudes and movements of these animals. But he painted more than just horses: the world around them also played an important role in his compositions. Here we see soldiers taking a brief break at a movable inn. Some, with or without a glass of beer, are still seated on their horses; others have already dismounted. One horse lies on the ground; soldiers are visible behind it. By the campfire at right we see more men, sleeping or smoking, and a woman with a child on her lap. Wouwerman’s large oeuvre comprises some 600 paintings, many of which found their way in the eighteenth century to princely collections across the Continent. Equestrian paintings were extremely popular at the courts of Europe. The eighteenth-century stadholder William V, whose collection formed the basis of the holdings of the Mauritshuis, had nine paintings by Wouwerman, which at the time were regarded as among the most valuable paintings in his possession. This panel came from the famous collection of the Amsterdam merchant Pieter van Winter (1745-1807) and his daughter, Anna (‘Annewies’) van Winter (1793-1877). Wouwerman’s great fame endured until Frick’s time, but declined markedly in the twentieth century. The Mauritshuis, determined to rectify this situation, therefore held the first ever exhibition on the artist in 2008.

Johannes Vermeer, Girl Interrupted at Her Music, c.1658-1659

Canvas, 39 x 45 cm

The Frick Collection, New York

Frick bought his first Vermeer in 1901, two years after his first important acquisition of an Old Master, the Portrait of aYoung Artist (pp. 76-77), then still attributed to Rembrandt. He was still living in Pittsburgh at the time. Vermeer’s Girl Interrupted at Her Music had been offered to him by his regular dealer, Charles Carstairs of Knoedler and Co. The Vermeer had been discovered by Abraham Bredius and Cornelis Hofstede de Groot (formerly Bredius’s assistant at the Mauritshuis) in an English country house in the summer of 1899. It was the fourth authentic Vermeer to come to the United States. The work, which had suffered from past restorations, was restored yet again shortly before the purchase. The sum of $26,000 that Frick paid for the painting was already considerably more than other American collectors had paid for their Vermeers, but he would pay even higher prices for his other two Vermeers. Moreover, he bought it at almost the same time as the painting by Philips Wouwerman (pp. 48-49), for which he paid the same dealer $9,000 – a substantial sum, because in those days this equestrian painter was still an artist of high repute.

Johannes Vermeer,

Canvas, 90

The Frick Collection, New York

Ten years later, on 11 November 1911, Frick, having meanwhile moved to New York, bought his second Vermeer, Officer and Laughing Girl. He had received the painting on approval, and immediately after a visit from Wilhelm von Bode and Roland Knoedler, he decided to buy it. Already known as a leading collector of Old Masters, Frick also had a reputation for paying record prices for good paintings. In the meantime, the price of a Vermeer had gone through

the roof. In early 1911 the collector Peter Widener, a business relation of Frick, had paid $175,000 for Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC). For Officer and Laughing Girl Frick paid Knoedler $225,000, another new record. (Knoedler had acquired the painting earlier that year from the widow of the London collector Samuel Joseph, together with three other art dealers with whom the profit had to be split.)

johannes vermeer

OFFICER AND LAUGHING GIRL, c .1657

Canvas, 51 x 46 cm. The Frick Collection, New York

The paintings by Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) – with their hushed atmosphere, subtle rendering of light, small highlights and sparkling reflections – can plunge the viewer into a reverie. Vermeer often painted interiors with one or two figures; in this painting we see two people in intimate conversation. The soldier, seen from the back, is in shadow. The young woman is bathed in light, and looks intently at the man. They seem completely wrapped up in each other, even though almost nothing of the man’s face is visible, so we cannot read his expression. The woman’s hands rest on a glass of white wine, so perhaps the scene is not entirely innocent. Drinking wine was certainly not encouraged in seventeenth-century Holland; excessive consumption was thought to stimulate licentious behaviour. The ambiguity surrounding the nature of the relationship between this man and woman leaves much to the imagination. The sublime rendering of light brings every surface in this painting to life, especially the woman’s radiant face. The map on the wall shows Holland and WestFriesland (a region in the province of Noord-Holland), as indicated in the Latin inscription: ‘NOVA ET ACCVRATA TOTIVS HOLLANDIAE WESTFRISIAEQ TOPOGRAPHIA’. We can also read: ‘HOLLAND’, ‘MARE GERMANICVM’ (the North Sea, to be seen at the top), and ‘DE ZUYDER ZEE’. This wall map, which was made by Balthasar van Berckenrode, probably in 1620, also exists in later editions. Such maps were hung in interiors, and similar examples appear in other works by Vermeer. (This is the subject of a recent publication by Rozemarijn Landsman, Vermeer’s Maps, New York 2022.) The map in this painting does not seem to have a deeper meaning, unless it is related in some way to the soldier’s presence. He defends the country, after all, even though the situation in the Dutch Republic was relatively calm after the conclusion of the Peace of Münster in 1648. Officer and Laughing Girl of around 1657 is considered one of Vermeer’s earliest and most appealing genre pieces. It was last on display in Europe in 1900, at an exhibition of Dutch paintings at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in London. The Mauritshuis can now exhibit this genre piece for several months, as a welcome addition to its own Vermeers.

In Manhattan Masters the 200-year-old Mauritshuis presents Dutch paintings from The Frick Collection in New York. This celebrated collection is usually on display only at the former residence of the wealthy collector Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919), so it is exceptional to have a selection on display in The Hague. The Frick Collection opened its doors to the public in 1935. Since then, it has gained a reputation as one of the most beautiful museums in the world, whose high-quality holdings include paintings, sculptures, objects of applied art and works on paper by the protagonists of European art history.

This book, published to accompany the exhibition, focuses exclusively on Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century and features outstanding works by renowned artists of that period, including Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals and Ruisdael. Their paintings are discussed as part of the larger story of the genesis and evolution of The Frick Collection, which took shape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – a Gilded Age in which the wealthiest Americans vied to possess the most beautiful art treasures of Europe. Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century were among the objects most sought after by Frick and other American collectors.

77), represents a turning point in the history of the collection. It was Frick’s first truly ambitious acquisition. Even though he had previously purchased, in 1896, another Old Master – a fruit still life by the eighteenth-century Dutch painter Jan van Os – that work fails to capture the imagination. Frick bought his supposed Rembrandt several months after a close acquaintance of his in Pittsburgh, the prominent collector Alexander Byers (1827-1900), had purchased a painting attributed to the master, so rivalry might have been a factor here. In 1899 Frick also bought at least twenty-seven other paintings, by masters young and old. By 1900, Frick had around a hundred paintings at Clayton, his Pittsburgh residence, hanging in the twenty-three rooms of that relatively modest mansion. Today this house forms the central part of The Frick Pittsburgh, a cluster of museums and historic buildings, where many of Frick’s earliest acquisitions are on display, including the previously mentioned River Landscape by George Hetzel.

Frick travelled with his family to Europe many times. In 1896 the family had stayed in The Hague, where Frick must have visited the Mauritshuis (see p. 96). After 1899, when he resigned from the Carnegie Steel Company, which had been created seven years earlier by the merger of Frick’s and Carnegie’s companies (see p. 30), Frick had fewer business responsibilities and therefore more time to concentrate on his collection. His search for paintings naturally took him to Europe, where he and his family continued to travel until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.

Frick bought art from various dealers in the United States and much further afield, but his dealer of choice became M. Knoedler & Co., with offices in both America and Europe. Frick was in direct

Jan van Os, Fruit Still Life, 1769. Canvas, 70 x 58 cm. The Frick Pittsburgh

Invoice, art dealer M. Knoedler & Co., 8 January 1910