America has fewer grand homes-turned-museums than Europe, for the perfectly simple reason that there have been Americans living grandly for so much less time. New York City has an unusually small number, and most of these bear no resemblance to their original uses. The Frick Collection is different. The museum, overlooking Central Park on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, was steel and coal baron Henry Clay Frick’s home and has remained home to his art — and then some. There is a rare accord still at work between the collection and the structures housing them. Frick hired Thomas Hastings to provide suitably grand spaces for his collection, and his daughter, Helen Clay Frick, hired John Russell Pope to do more of the same for its expansion to museum use. Some of the pieces remain exactly where they were in 1919, when Frick died. And, after a more-than-200-million-dollar renovation that began in March of 2020, the place reopened on April 17.

The Frick has returned in excellent form. About 60 contractors labored on the “first comprehensive upgrade of its facilities ever,” upgrading skylights and artificial lighting, refinishing wood, and even reweaving silk walls. The vast majority of this was polishing, so to speak, and the sheen is high. To address concerns first, the project attracted entirely warranted preservationist ire for the demolition of Pope’s wonderful first-floor music........

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