Henry Clay Frick - greedy industrialist but stunning art collector

Frick home in Pittsburgh

later the Frick Art & Historical Centre

Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919) was born to comfortable Mennonites, in West Overton, a rural community in SW Pennsylvania. He was the second of 6 children of an immigrant farmer who married into a flour merchant and whisky distiller family. Receiving only a brief formal education, Frick quickly ent­ered the working world. He worked as a sale­s­man in a Pittsburgh shop then as the chief book­keeper in his family distil­lery.

Frick home and gallery in New York

In the fledgling iron industry, the rich coal beds yielded seams of quality bituminous coal, id­eal for coking. In Mar 1871 Frick and a cousin in­vested family money to acquire low-priced coking fields and build 50 coke ovens. In time H.C Frick Coke Co operated c1000 working coke ovens and produced 80% of the coke used by Pittsburgh's burg­eon­ing iron and steel industries.

Taking advantage of the diff­icult times after the Financial Panic of 1873, Frick expanded his busin­ess, funded by brokering the sale of a local railroad to the Baltimore and Ohio Co. The US was at the peak of a massive railway build­ing pro­ject, needing much iron and steel. In order to smelt iron efficiently, coal was transformed into carbon-rich coke in huge ovens. The area around Pittsburgh, which contained the richest American coal seam, became the centre of a massive min­­­ing and cok­ing industry, supplied by Frick!

Frick soon moved to Pitts­burgh, estab­lishing residence in the prosp­erous Homewood suburb after marriage in 1881 to Adelaide Howard Childs, daughter of a boot maker. Soon af­ter, Frick met steel magnate Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), be­ginning a long, integrated bus­in­ess relationship. In 1882, Frick re­or­ganised the firm into H.C Frick Coke Co with huge assets and a stock issue of 40,000 shares.

Henry Clay Frick

The Fricks' first home was an 11-room, 2.5 storey house bought in Aug 1882. This Italianate residence was later re­mod­el­l­ed into a 23-room, 4-storey Loire château, later becoming the Frick Art & Historical Centre.

In 1889 Frick became chairman of Carnegie Brothers and Co. steel bus­i­ness. He introduced major improve­ments and bought out Carnegie’s chief competitor, Duquesne Steel Works. He was responsible for building Carnegie into the largest manu­facturer of steel and coke in the world.

NB a historic scandal. The South Fork Fishing & Hunting Club counted many of Pittsburgh’s leading industrialists and financiers in its 61 members, incl Andrew Carnegie, Henry Frick and Andrew Mellon. There was an init­iat­ive to convert a former public dam in Pennsyl­vania into an elite luxury resort, the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. The dam’s height was lowered when building a road over it, and safety requirements were ignored on Club members' command. In May 1889 endless rain burst the dam, drowning the down­-river community of John­s­town and its 2,200 people. An investig­at­ion by the American Soc­iety of Civil Eng­ineers allocated no fault. No-one at the Club was gaoled, nor did they pay dam­ages to working class families who lost relatives and homes.

Next Frick tried to destroy the most important ele­ment of my pol­itical life: using his skills to prevent workers in the cok­ing ind­ustry from unionising. Labour in steelworks was more organ­is­ed, but Frick under­cut unions in his factories. This led in 1892 to a key con­flict in the history of American labour between the Amal­gamated Ass­oc­iation-AA of Iron and Steel Workers and the Carneg­ie Steel Co. To counter union demands for a raise, Frick threat­ened to cut wages just when steel prices were high.

In July 1892 workers at Carnegie Steel Co.’s Homestead Works went on strike. Until they refused to come back to work, Frick lock­ed the workers outside. An army of 300 strike-breakers from Pinkerton National Detective Agency were brought in to guard the mills, turning Homestead into a war-zone. In the ensuing Bat­­tle, many steel workers were killed or injured, quel­led only by the interv­ent­ion of the National Guard. Mar­tial law was declared and the plant resumed operations with the starving workers still picketing.

Frick's actions in the Battle resulted in attempted mur­d­er. In July 1892, Frick and the Carnegie Steel vice-president were talking in Frick's office when Russian anarchist Alex­an­der Berkman rushed in. Berk­man pul­l­ed a revolver and shot Frick to the floor; then Berk­man aimed again. John Lei­sh­man pro­tected Frick and forced Berkman to miss his target, so he tried stabbing the wounded Frick. Leish­man went af­ter Berkman who was grabbed by the local sher­iff. Frick survived and public sympathy for the strikers collapsed.

In 1900, J.P Morgan consolid­at­ed both Carnegie Steel Co. and H.C Frick Co. into US Steel Corpor­at­ion, with Frick as director. Bec­ause of his body pain, the position was the end of Frick's long career.

Art Collection
Frick had neither a great education nor art-loving friends, yet having seen the best art in Europe during his trips, his eye grew astute. This was an era when Eur­ope’s aristo­crats were declining in fortune, even as American business­men grew very pros­perous. Art crossed the Atlantic!

Frick’s New York man­s­ion, bought in 1905, was specifically designed to house the coll­ec­tion. It was to be a gall­ery that would en­courage the public’s study of fine arts. And he added $15 million for maint­enance.

Other industrialists built private col­l­ections, but they oft­en out­sourced buying works to expert advisers. Frick made his own art choices eg Giovanni Bellini, Hans Hol­bein II, Diego Veláz­quez, Rub­ens and Fragonard. And 3 striking works by Johannes Vermeer.

Rembrandt, Polish Rider, 1655

Girl Interrupted at Her Music, 

Johannes Vermeer. Wikimedia Commons

By his 1919 death, Frick had left $15,000,000 and his Fifth Ave home to establish the Frick Collection: paintings, bronzes & enamels he’d long collected. The Frick Collection is one of my fav­our­ite mus­eums, created by a largely self-made man in a fine New York treasure! And Frick's phil­an­thropic activities were important. He be­queathed the sizable Frick Park to Pittsburgh and gave to Princeton Uni.

But the real story might be of a robber bar­on, a ruthless industrial­ist. Clearly if art has a moral pur­pose i.e to make art lovers resp­on­s­ible citizens, Frick showed oth­erwise. If we are to value art at all, it must be largely on its own terms, rath­er than as a func­tion of the own­er’s morality or politics.