Frick donation still with us today
H.C. Frick is not known as a benefactor when it comes to Fayette County. Nearly a hundred years after his death, the mines he once owned continue to spill toxins into county streams.
Frick’s hostility to the trade union movement was titanic, the residue of which continues to resonate.
In short, Frick took more out of Fayette County than he put in. His tremendous wealth was banked on the hard labor of thousands of local coal miners who trudged to work not knowing if they would walk out, alive and well.
Coal mining was inherently unsafe, and unsafer yet in a Frick mine. Almost in spite of its Safety First sloganeering, Frick mines were hazardous to life and limb. Statistically, they were among the worst.
It’s a surprise then to come across an example of Frick giving back to the community. But there it is.
“While in Paris this past summer,” Frick wrote to a Uniontown acquaintance in 1901, “I went out to Versailles and saw a very good portrait of Gen. Lafayette in the palace there, and had a copy made, which I would like to give to Fayette County.”
Frick had in mind hanging the Lafayette portrait in “a good place” in the courthouse. He asked the acquaintance, J.V. Thompson, to see if it could be done. “Please let me hear from you.”
Thompson responded quickly, after conferring with the county commissioners and President Judge Edmund Reppert. “The large courtroom is the most fitting place to hang it, provided that place meets with your approval,” Thompson wrote deferentially.
Thompson promised “fitting testimonials” to Frick because of the gift, though there is no suggestion in the correspondence that Frick was looking for a public pat on the back.
In short order, Frick let Thompson know the painting was coming his way. “I take great pleasure in presenting this to Fayette County,” he wrote on the last day of October in 1901.
The copy was shipped from France to Pittsburgh at the end of 1902.
The portrait of Gen. Lafayette hangs today in Courtroom Number One at the courthouse, just to the right of the presiding judge, maybe in the same spot it was placed those many years ago.
Cleaned up about a decade ago, when specks of accumulated soot were removed, it is a superb copy, say those who know more about such things than I do.
The painting is from the original by Joseph-Desire Court, who received a commission from the French government to execute the Lafayette portrait in 1834, two years after the great man’s death and nine years after Lafayette visited Fayette County, one of many places he was honored during a triumphal tour of the United States.
He lunched with Albert Gallatin at Friendship Hill on that occasion. It would have been natural for the two men to toast their dear friend Thomas Jefferson.
In the painting given to the county by Frick, Lafayette is portrayed as a lieutenant general. He was a young man from an aristocratic family when he arrived unbidden in the colonies to aid the cause of the American Revolution. He was a democrat at heart. He wrote the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, inspired by our Declaration of Independence.
Frick paid a small sum for the painting-copy, the equivalent in today’s dollars of about $5,000. The columnist was disappointed to learn that it was not the original and that Frick had dished out so little for it until he was set right by Julie Ludwig, assistant archivist at the Frick Collection and Art Reference Library in New York City.
“I don’t know of any other occasion in which Frick commissioned a copy of an existing work to present as a gift, but there certainly may be instances of which I am not aware,” she emailed a while back.
“More typically, Frick would commission an original work for presentation, as he did with Chartran’s “Signing of the Protocol,” which he gave to Theodore Roosevelt, and is now in the collection of the White House Historical Association.
“Based on Frick’s initial letter to Thompson, though, it seems there was something about this work that appealed to him, and he thought it might be appropriate gift for Fayette County.
“The copy was done by the artist Chabod, about whom we don’t appear to know very much at all. I did find two artists with this surname in the Benezit Dictionary of Artists, but one seems to be too early, and the other seems too late.”
If we don’t know much about the artist, we know plenty about Lafayette, and why it’s an honor for the county to bear his name and why Frick’s gift still matters.
On his tour of the United States, Lafayette was feted in Charlottesville, Va., with Jefferson presiding. The third president hailed Lafayette’s military contributions to America’s humbling, stumbling beginnings.
“He made our cause his own,” said Jefferson who, posted to France, knew a thing or two about Lafayette’s help in securing the American future following the war with England. Lafayette’s aid was invaluable. “I only held the nail, he drove it,” Jefferson summarized.
At a dinner in Paris as the French Revolution tumbled into anarchy, Jefferson was present as Lafayette and others discussed the spectacle of chaos in the streets of Paris and how to save the revolt against the monarchy and on behalf of equality from itself.
With hotheads in the ascendancy, Lafayette was cool and collected. “No gaudy tinsel of rhetoric” escaped his lips, Jefferson said.
It’s a phrase and a mode of behavior we might all take to heart today.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books: “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.