NEW YORK, NY.- The Frick Art Reference Library is famed for its wealth of resources, including books, exhibition and auction catalogs, periodicals, photograph collections, archives, and ephemera―a notable percentage of which are unique among like institutions. As a public resource for art historical research―considered one of the top five such libraries in the world―it is also a leader in digitization. For this reason, the institution has received a series of four grants from the Metropolitan New York Library Council to fund Documenting the Gilded Age, a project focused on the digitization and greater accessibility of historical materials that document art collections in Gilded Age New York. Online exhibitions created by library staff highlight each phase of the project and provide historical context. Phases one (2011) and two (2012), conducted by the Frick Art Reference Library and the Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives, digitized ephemeral exhibition checklists, pamphlets, and catalogs from eleven historically significant galleries, society clubs, and arts associations operating from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Phase three (2013), a project of the Frick Art Reference Library and the William Randolph Hearst Archive at Long Island University, digitized auction catalogs and archival materials for the same time period, with a focus on decorative arts. The recently completed phase four, Documenting Art Collections in Gilded Age New York, presents seventy-nine private collection catalogs held at the Frick Art Reference Library, including those of prominent industrialists and notable women, as well as unnamed or less well-known collectors. These newly digitized catalogs and a related online exhibition at http://www.frick.org/GA4 make hundreds of rare and unique materials available to the public online for the first time.

The digitized catalogs represent collections formed during a period of great prosperity in America. With wealth, curiosity, and often a civic-minded drive to educate and please their fellow citizens, the cultural leaders of the Gilded Age embraced the opportunities afforded them, purchasing art from cash-poor British and European aristocrats and amassing impressive collections of their own, many of which would ultimately form the bedrock of America’s great museums.

Although the pace of art collecting rapidly increased across the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, New York was the epicenter of the art market and boasted the greatest number of private art collections and art associations during this period.

As a group, the Frick’s collection catalogs make clear that art collecting was a significant part of the fabric of city life. True, it was mainly a pastime of the rich, but the Frick's catalogs offer a more nuanced view: not all New York collectors were spectacularly wealthy, and not all spectacularly wealthy New Yorkers were great collectors. Some, like Cornelius Vanderbilt, followed the era’s prevailing taste for contemporary European and American art (mostly landscapes and genre scenes), while others, such as H. O. Havemeyer and his wife Louisine, broke new ground by acquiring Impressionist paintings. Still others—Henry Clay Frick among them—consistently pursued works of the highest quality. Documenting the Gilded Age includes information on all of these collectors and many others.

An accompanying online exhibition highlights the research value of these catalogs. Using images from the digitized catalogs and other archival materials from the Frick, the exhibition presents profiles of Gilded Age collectors, the works that most interested them, and the display of art in their homes. It also examines how the public perception of Gilded Age collectors has shifted with time. Created using Google Open Gallery, the exhibition begins with a short video written and narrated by Dr. Inge Reist, Director of the Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick Art Reference Library. States Dr. Reist:“The richly interdisciplinary field of the history of collecting is very much on the ascendance, in part because it celebrates human activity. Studying this aspect of cultural history reminds us that the desire to acquire beautiful objects is universal and the market forces that make possible the formation of great collections likewise have changed little over time. By availing researchers of online access to the treasure trove of the Frick Art Reference Library’s collections, this project has enriched the field of the history of collecting and has made possible more precise documentation of great collections of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New York.”