The Frick Art Museum

The Frick Art Museum. . , The Italian Renaissance-style Frick Art Museum was designed by Pittsburgh architects Pratt, Schafer and Slowik and opened in October 1970. The other buildings that now make up The Frick Pittsburgh (Clayton, the Car and Carriage Museum, the Playhouse, and the Greenhouse) were not open to the public for another twenty years., The museum is home to the collection of Helen Clay Frick, who grew up at Clayton, the family home on the corner of Penn and Homewood Avenues at the other end of the property. Helen's personal collecting interests included French 18th-century painting and decorative arts, and early Italian Renaissance painting., Inspired by her fathers construction of The Frick Collection in New York, Helen also believed that art was best appreciated in elegant galleries, designed to feel more like domestic spaces than large, public exhibit halls., [Captions:] , This oil study (detail) by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732 - 1806 is the earliest painting purchased by Helen Clay Frick. It illustrates her love of 18th-century French painting, and connects her collecting interests to her father's., At her death in 1984, Helen Clay Frick (above, c. 1950) left plans for Clayton and the adjacent grounds, including the art museum, to be opened to the public., The Frick Art Museum's Italian Renaissance style echoes Helen's other building projects, including the Frick Fine Arts Building at the University of Pittsburgh., The gallery of Italian art has a fine selection of rare, early panel paintings from Siena including this Virgin of Humility (detail by Stefano di Giovanni, called Sassetta (c. 1400 - 1450).