Inside a Century Old Gilded Age Mansion Filled With Priceless Art | Vogue

Hi Vogue, I'm Amy Ng. We're here in New York City. We're at the Frick Collection, which is a historic house on Fifth Avenue. I'm the chief curator here, and these are the objects of my affection. A great work of art stops you in your tracks. It makes you think, it makes you look, it makes you think about other people. And to me, that's what a lot of the art in this building does. I mean, it was very, very typical to have British portraits in a dining room, both in England, in English country houses, and then in the American houses of those collectors who were, in a sense, emulating their British precedents. So this is Gainsborough's portrait of the Honorable Francis Duncombe. And what she's wearing is this amazing blue satin dress that's inspired by Van Dyck style of the previous century. And that was sort of a masquerade thing. It connected her to history, but it was also showing off a lot of wealth. So it's covered, dripping in pearls. You can see that even the hat that she's holding is lined in pearls. She's carrying another little bracelet of pearls from her hand, and there are more pearls up, woven through her hair, which is the height of fashion in the 1770s. It's called a pouf. If you imagine having a portrait made of yourself today, for example, and you decide to choose something that's this exuberant, sort of flamboyant, almost costume, it's not like this is something that you'd wear out. With that standing dog-tooth collar, it just takes her out of time a little bit. And it's just a really extraordinary expression of identity. Well, there are five of the seven Gainsborough pictures are here in the dining room. A couple of busts over here, and really an extraordinary kind of outlier in Gainsborough's oeuvre, this mall at St. James's Park. What I love about this one is not only are the ladies sort of in cliques, sort of looking at each other, sizing each other up, so are their little doggies. The evening, it gets so dark. You sort of get this ghostly feeling. So we're here in the West Vestibule, and we have four paintings, 18th century French, by François Boucher, and they are the Four Seasons. And traditionally, what's funny is, Four Seasons were sometimes illustrated by labors, like the work you do at every season. Well, for Boucher, it was more like the joy and pleasure of each season. So one of my favorites ones is Winter over here, where she's being pushed in this snow-decorated sleigh, but of course, she's leaving her décolletage all open and free. Throughout, you can just see these tiny little details that tell you what season it is, but really, it's about the luxury of living a privileged life. It's like almost like a maximal way of imagining living life, and that's sort of the Vivienne Westwood thing. And so sometimes she used Boucher images in the clothing. Sometimes she just used it in the store display. You could see that she was really thinking about this historic past as a way to almost make extreme her contemporary clothing. So this is one of the three Vermeers that are in the collection, and Vermeer's most famous for these light-filled domestic spaces of women, men talking, these wonderful materials that you can see almost photorealistically, and this is a perfect example. It's called Officer and Laughing Girl. She's holding a little glass of white wine. He's wearing this big, broad-brimmed hat, and there's this wall map behind them that is so meticulously painted that we can actually identify which map it is. It's a 1621 map of Holland and West Friesland. All of Vermeer's pictures are kind of like this, that you think that there's a narrative story, but it doesn't really tell you exactly what's going on. So art historians have loved to play with, well, what's really happening here? Is it flirtation? Is it actually a sincere love match? Is she a prostitute? So there's all these sort of rumors that art historians have been sort of testing, and we don't know the answer, and I think part of the reason why these paintings are so interesting is because they're meant to get you thinking, and there's a little bit of a mystery around them that keeps you coming back. Welcome to the corner of power where Louis XIV's scepter, which he's holding up like this, is matched by Bronzino's codpiece, which is a symbol of male virility in the Renaissance. We don't often get to talk about elements of male fashion that went in and then out of style. For this portrait, that codpiece, which, am I allowed to talk about male genitalia? Great. Was this element of fashion that came into popularity around 1500, and for 100 years, anyone who could wore a codpiece. Pants used to be pant leg, pant leg, flap. Well, that flap started to grow. It started to become a little bit of a purse. You could put some letters in there, and more importantly, it really symbolized the virility of the wearer. What's interesting about it is that as soon as it goes out of fashion, it almost becomes kind of obscene to see, because, well, for obvious reasons, it's sort of just sticking out of there. In the 19th century, before Frick bought this picture, somebody on the art market had painted over the white codpiece so that it disappeared, and it was just a little bit more reserved, and it wasn't until the 1940s, well after Frick died, that conservators here realized there was something underneath and took off the overpaint, and there, in its gleaming glory, the codpiece came back. So the Frick is not just about paintings and sculptures, but also decorative arts objects, and especially furniture like this secretaire or sort of fall-open desk. This is French, 18th century, and it was made for Marie Antoinette. The story with this is she had this and its partner, the commode, made around 1770, and then when she was arrested during the French Revolution, about 20 years later, she wanted them brought with her to her sort of prison rooms in the Tuileries Palace. She brought them, but they didn't quite fit properly, so she asked the cabinetmaker to come back and refit them for her for her prison rooms. She still got the royal treatment, even under incarceration. Here in the Frick's living hall, and one of the most famous paintings in the Frick's collection is this Venetian Renaissance picture by Giovanni Bellini of St. Francis in the desert. So we're looking at around 1470s, which is pretty amazing to think this large-scale, oil-on-panel painting and such delicate glazes being made at that time. And it's showing the saint in the desert, so he's rejected the worldly goods for this sort of monastic life. This is a religious picture, but it's actually about nature. There's King Fisher, there's sheep with a shepherd in the back. There's all these little surprises that really bring to life this so-called religious scene, but is much more about the natural world and our place in it. When I look at this picture, I'm always looking for something new. I'm looking to see something that I haven't before. And even if it's something I've noticed before, I'm seeing it differently this time. And it's sort of this regenerating composition, like a natural landscape. Are we gonna go look at Diana's pudenda? Follow me, we're gonna go see Diana. So this is Diana. We're here at the apex of the Portico Gallery, and this is an 18th century French sculpture by Houdon during the construction of the last four years when we were working on the Frick's reopening. We took all of the works of art out of the Frick, but we left her. And the reason was, it was more dangerous to move her out of the building than it was to just leave her alone and build a protective cage around her because her entire figure is resting on the ball of her foot. And this, of course, is just clay. It's baked clay. It's a very, very sensual and fragile material. This one in particular has an interesting story because one of its earlier owners prior to Frick had a son who was getting a little bit too excited at the sight of this very nude and beautiful figure to the point where this previous owner augmented part of her anatomy, literally censored the genitalia of Diana. That was removed, by the way, so our chief conservator had the great job of having to remove the extra filling. And she was very concerned that Frick audiences would be shocked and in horror over the true unveiling of the truly nude Diana. But luckily, people were okay with the nude body. We're here in the West Gallery, and there's so much in here. Like, I could just name on one wall, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velazquez, Goya, El Greco, Turner's. I mean, there's just so much going on in here that you could really spend the entire day just looking and enjoying. Imagine that this was built for a private person and his family of three who lived here. It's amazing to think that soon after moving in here, he made the decision to, after his death and that of his wife, donate. He would give this building and its art collection as a public museum to the city of New York. I'm standing in front of Rembrandt's largest self-portrait. Of all the many self-portraits he made, this is the largest one. And not only is it really big, he looks like a king. He looks like he's sitting there in a throne with a scepter facing forward almost with a cape on. He's gone bankrupt by now. And so what he's painting here is kind of a figment. It's a projection, it's a construction. It reminds us that all of the paintings you see everywhere are actually just paint on canvas. And it's not about reality. It might've been what he looked like, but he certainly didn't feel like a king at the time. Along the way in scouting here is a set of buttons. And these are call buttons made of mother-of-pearl and they are labeled housekeeper, valet, secretary, pantry, and butler. They really remind us that there were lives lived here in this building, both of the people who were pressing these buttons and those who would be answering those calls. So the second floor of the Frick's home was not really seen by that many people. It was really the only guests pretty much who were staying overnight who had come upstairs. And we're walking right now on a rug that is without a seam. Like this was made in one long weave and it's a pretty amazing thing. So when it gets trashed by all the public who are coming in with muddy feet, that'll be a very expensive repair. I know you didn't want to hear that, but that's what I think about every time I come up because for the first time people are actually stepping on this carpet as members of the public and not just as family guests. So we're here in the Boucher room. It has paintings of these little babies and acting arts and sciences like painting and fishing and things like that. This was Mrs. Frick's boudoir. I don't know if you can hear me, but the floor is creaking a little bit differently than it did downstairs. This is an 18th century French parquet that's been restored and brought up here piece by piece. What I like is this little vignette of this little toddler doing marble sculpture and the little bust that he's doing is not just any random bust, but actually something that really existed and was made by one of Boucher's contemporaries at the time. So he's incorporating sort of contemporary art and the things that he was seeing around him. This is the kind of room that reminds you that the Frick is not just a collection of art in a place. It's the whole thing together. It's the carvings on the wall, the paintings themselves, the furniture, all of it, even the floor, all coming together to make a masterpiece. We're here in the Walnut room. This was Henry Clay Frick's bedroom and it is where he died in December of 1919, just after his 70th birthday. And in here, we have what some people refer to as the poster girl of the Frick collection. This is a portrait by Ingres, the 19th century French neoclassical painter of the Comtesse d'Haussonville. And why is it the poster girl? Well, it's become so familiar to Frick visitors that as soon as people come into the building, they're like, where is she? Where is the Comtesse? Even though it seems to be an instant, like she's just come back from the opera, the shawl's been thrown, the purse has been shown, all of these things that give an air of informality, the body is all wrong. And in the drawings, you see him actually moving the arm lower and lower. And for those people who see this painting for the first time, they're like, well, it looks so real. And then they start to notice that the elbow is coming out of her hip. And then for our physics majors, they look in the mirror and they say, wait a minute, the reflection doesn't make any sense at all. You wouldn't be able to see the finger. And the whole thing is this kind of game to show you painting is this construction. It's an illusion. He's making magic on this canvas. These were the objects of my affection. Thanks for watching.