American industrialist, collector, and museum creator. Frick received little formal education and went to work at an early age as a bookkeeper. By the early 1870s he had earnt enough money to buy up coke fields in Western Pennsylvania, processing the coke in his own ovens. In a few short years he was the major supplier of fuel for Pittsburgh’s iron and steel industries and by the time he was 30 had earned his first million. In celebration he travelled to Europe with Andrew Mellon who, in 1937, would donate his collection and money for the establishment of Washington’s National Gallery of Art. In London they visited the Wallace Collection, which would later serve as prototype for Frick’s New York house–museum. After marrying Adelaide Howard Childs (1859–1931) on 15 December 1881, Frick bought and expanded Clayton, a 23-room home, now part of the Frick Art and Historical Center, Pittsburgh.

In addition to Mellon, with whom he remained close, the other critical figure in Frick’s professional life was Andrew Carnegie, whom he met in 1881 while on his honeymoon in New York. Fifteen years his senior, Carnegie by the early 1880s had made a fortune in the manufacturing of steel, and the two men went into partnership. They remained close, but a falling out over Frick’s handling of the Homestead strike (1892) and later policy matters turned once respectful associates into bitter enemies. After 11 years Frick resigned as chairman of Carnegie Steel Company in 1900 and began collecting art in earnest aided in large part by the art dealer Roland Knoedler.

By the turn of the 20th century, Frick and his family were living in New York City and in 1905 rented William H. Vanderbilt’s house on Fifth Avenue where Frick displayed his growing collection of artworks. In 1906 he bought property on Fifth Avenue between East 70th and 71st streets that had formerly belonged to James Lenox. His family moved into their new mansion at 1 East 70th Street, designed by Thomas Hastings, in early 1915. Shortly before moving, Frick, accompanied by the dealer Joseph Duveen, toured the memorial exhibition of the J. P. Morgan collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from which he purchased paintings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Renaissance bronzes, and French porcelain, enamels, and furniture. The home, with its storied artworks, became known as the Frick Collection when it opened to the public December 1935.

Among the most renowned paintings that Frick bought are Giovanni Bellini’s St Francis in the Desert (c. 1480; acquired 1915); Hans Holbein the younger’s Sir Thomas More (1527; acquired 1912); Titian’s Pietro Aretino (1548–51; acquired 1905); Paolo Veronese’s Allegory of Virtue and Vice (The Choice of Hercules) (c. 1580; acquired 1912); Rembrandt van Rijn’s Polish Rider (c. 1655; acquired, 1910) and his Self-portrait (1658; acquired, 1906); Diego Velázquez’s King Philip IV of Spain (1664; acquired 1911); Johannes Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl (1655–60; acquired, 1911); El Greco’s St Jerome (1590–1600; acquired 1905); Constable, John’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Garden (1826; acquired 1908); and James McNeill Whistler’s Symphony in Flesh Color and Pink: Portrait of Mrs Frances Leyland (1872–3; acquired 1916).

After Frick’s death in 1919, his daughter Helen Clay Frick (1888–1984) furthered his legacy by expanding the collection to include, among others, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Comtesse d’Haussonville (1854; acquired 1927) and the Education of the Virgin (c. 1650; acquired 1948) from the studio of Georges de La Tour, and through the establishment of the Frick Art Reference Library (1920) and the creation of the Frick Art and Historical Center in Pittsburgh, which was opened to the public in 1990.