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Clayton, the Frick family home in Point Breeze.
The cover of Martha Sanger's new biography of her great-aunt Helen Clay Frick is a portrait detail of a slim and pleasant-faced girl in a frilly white dress -- the embodiment of all a Victorian young lady should be.
A closer look at the eyes gives some hint of the utterly complex person who was still developing when Helen sat for this portrait at age 17.
As her diary notes on her birthday: "Passed through the year into my 17th. Feel I have not done much yet."
Sanger has done a masterful job of conveying what was to come, in a large and handsome book packed with family photographs and reprints from the vast Frick art collections. The modern sensibility she brings to the story, beginning with the epigraph by poet Sharon Olds, gives us an honest but loving view of Helen's long and influential life.
Symington Sanger
University of Pittsburgh
Press ($40)
The Frick family was defined by the death at 5 of their second child, Martha Howard Frick, in the summer of 1891. Henry Clay Frick had adored his little "Rosebud," surrounded himself with mementos of her and mourned her, profoundly, all his life.
His remaining daughter Helen, only 3 when Martha died, was marked forever by this early loss, by her own sorrow at losing her adored sister, empathy for her father's very evident pain, the inability to ever be as perfect as Martha might have been and bearing alone her father's demanding devotion. (Her brother Childs was treated harshly by his father as a young man.)
The other major factor that shaped the family, of course, was wealth. Frick was born to poor circumstances, but the family was well off by the time Helen was born in 1888.
Because of Frick's holdings in U.S. Steel, his net worth jumped from $16 million in 1899 to $65 million in 1902 (more than $1.5 billion in current dollars).
That much money can delude a person. While Helen was always aware of the poverty of others, she was misguided about how much power her money entitled her to.
One of her greatest frustrations after Frick's death was with the board of the Frick Collection. A member of the board almost to the end of her life, Helen felt that she had special insight into what she always thought of as her father's collection, especially because she had been his partner in building it from the age of 8.
The other trustees, however, marginalized her from the beginning. Being the only woman on the board doubtless made matters worse.
While much of Helen's adult life was taken up with art -- collecting it, donating it, and supporting the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Fine Arts -- philanthropic ventures were at least as important to her.
In 1909, she founded the Iron Rail, a free vacation home in Massachusetts for young working women, which she supervised closely until 1954.
Hundreds of women benefited from their association with the Iron Rail and from Helen's many other philanthropic projects, large and small.
Other important contributions include Pittsburgh's Frick Park, a gift to the city Helen requested of her father when she made her debut at 20, and the Frick Art and Historical Center.
Balanced against her great achievements, Helen's flaws are especially disappointing. Despite her generous spirit, she harbored prejudices that no one could talk her out of. She barred Germans from her art reference library. Once she turned against a friend, it was almost impossible to regain her affections.
Sanger has fond memories of her "grauntie" Helen, prefaces the book with several of them, and appears as a character toward the end. This is an extremely personal biography, making the family's painful history feel very present, especially for Pittsburghers.
Readers may find themselves seeking the family plot in Homewood Cemetery, or visiting Clayton, the family home in Point Breeze, with renewed appreciation.
Frick never wanted Helen to marry, and the demands he placed on her seem inappropriate today. She, however, was apparently more than happy to try to meet them.
Helen considered her father a hero in every way, and while history might dispute that belief, her lifelong quest to honor him led her to heroic heights of her own.
