With a heavy art

A ruthless, intransigent man, who fought against the unions and never took responsibility for a tragedy that killed more than 2,000 people, Henry Clay Frick nonetheless had a redeeming quality: he bequeathed the world an exceptional art collection, finds Michael Prodger

- Michael Prodger

THE Robber Barons, those late-19th-century American industrialists who grew spectacularly rich through harsh business practices, have long gone. John Jacob Astor, Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt remain familiar even if the rapacity that underlay their wealth has been forgotten. Their names live on as symbols of plutocracy and of lives lived amid art bought wholesale from the old world to decorate the gilded mansions of the new.

All these men sought to soften their voracious reputations through philanthropy—Rockefeller supported medical research, Astor and Carnegie endowed libraries, Vanderbilt helped establish the Metropolitan Opera, Mellon and Morgan became major donors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. However, the Robber Baron who most successfully distanced himself from the source of his riches was Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919). His name is now synonymous with the Frick Collection, that dazzling gathering of art and artefacts housed in his spectacular mansion opposite Central Park on Fifth Avenue in New York, US.

Time and art-washing have erased almost all the smudges left by the coke and steel businesses he founded and ran, as well as the scandals that accompanied his career.

All the same, Frick was no Medici. He was a ruthless, intransigent man, who fought against the unions and never took responsibility for the tragedy at his coke works in 1889, when a dam burst and killed more than 2,000 people in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. He was widely loathed and, in 1892, was shot and stabbed by the anarchist Alexander Berkman, who managed to wound Frick seriously, but not fatally. He was, in short, a man who would have been cancelled many times over had he lived a century later.