Welcome to The Frick Collection's digital archive. This site enables visitors to browse and download jpegs of large format digital files created through projects supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Henry Luce Foundation and METRO. The collections include photoarchive images and documentation, book materials, Frick Collection images, and archival documents.

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Explore Our Digital Projects

Art Image Exploration Space (ARIES)

ARIES - ARt Image Exploration Space, is an interactive image manipulation system that enables the exploration and organization of fine digital art. The system allows images to be compared in multiple ways, offering dynamic overlays analogous to a physical light box, and supporting advanced image comparisons and feature-matching functions, available through computational image processing.

Stanford AI and Machine Learning Project

By applying VGG--a popular deep neural network architecture--to the automatic generation of classification headings for works of art represented in the Library's Photoarchive, researchers at Stanford University have been able to minimize the time photoarchivists spend labeling and correcting records.

Archives Directory for the History of Collecting in America

The Archives Directory for the History of Collecting is a pioneering resource created to help researchers locate primary source material about American art collectors, dealers, agents and advisors, and the repositories that hold these records. The database is a work in progress that is regularly updated with information contributed by both institutions and individuals.

Describe It!

Help make images in the digital Photoarchive accessible to people living with visual disabilities! Describe It! asks volunteers to describe the visual content of an image in 15 words or less. The descriptions become alt-text code that can be read by assistive technologies such as screen reader software. Volunteering to contribute to Describe It! will help make The Frick Art Reference Library collections accessible to all.

Archives Transcription Project

You can help The Frick Collection and Frick Art Reference Library Archives make historical documents more searchable and accessible by transcribing digitized materials. The Art Collecting Files of Henry Clay Frick were recently digitized and are now available online thanks to a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. To enhance the research value of this collection, we need your help in transcribing these items.

Photoarchive

The Photoarchive is a study collection of more than one million photographic reproductions of works of art by fourth to mid-twentieth century artists trained in the Western tradition. Each photograph is accompanied by historical documentation that traces the essential elements of the biography of a work of art — changes of attribution, ownership, and condition. The images together with the historical documentation provide an unparalleled resource for the study of the history of art. At present, the Frick is systematically digitizing the Photoarchive collection and making it available on this site.

Note: Some of the images in this collection are currently being cataloged and have limited metadata. Images without documentation are searchable only by Creator name and National School.

Books

The Frick Art Reference Library has book and e-book collections relating mainly to paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints from the fourth to the mid-twentieth centuries by European and American artists. The decorative arts are a secondary area of collecting. Within these subjects the collections focus on, to name a few related to this site:  Attributions, Auction Sales, Collecting, Provenance, Exhibitions, and Collectors.
 
Auction catalogs make up more than 90,000 volumes in our collection. The catalogs represent 1,000 auction houses in Europe, Australia, and the Americas, ranging in date from the eighteenth century to the present. Annotated catalogs and price lists, when available, have been acquired to provide additional sales information. Unique and rare catalogs continue to be added. We are currently digitizing many of our auction catalogs, which will be added to the ones already available on this site.

We strive to make all items accessible to as many viewers as possible by providing access through the Internet Archive, which offers a wider range of formats for download. We recognize accessibility as an ethical responsibility and encourage viewers to explore our collection on the Internet Archive here.

Archives

The mission of the Archives is to preserve and document the rich history of The Frick Collection and Frick Art Reference Library, the Frick family, and scholarship in the fine arts. The resources available on this site reflect efforts to digitize both photographs and text-based materials, including construction images of Henry Clay Frick’s original New York residence and later The Frick Collection and Frick Art Reference Library, Frick family travel albums, images of artists and artwork, and collections relating to art collectors and collecting. Contact the Archives.