The Lenox Library antedated by some years the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

It was designed by Richard Morris Hunt, who died in 1893, and whose Memorial, the work of Daniel Chester French, is on the edge of the opposite Park.
The site of the old Library is now occupied by the house of Mr.Henry C.
Frick, one of the great show residences of the Avenue and the city.
Beautiful as it unquestionably is, the veriest layman is conscious of the fact that, for the full effect, a longer approach is needed.

A broad garden separates the house, which is eighteenth-century English, from the sidewalk.

The gallery, the low wing at the upper corner, with lunettes in sculpture by Sherry Fry, Phillip Martiny, Charles Keck, and Attilio Piccirilli, contains pictures by Titian, Paul Veronese, Velasquez, Murillo, Van Dyck, Franz Hals, Rembrant, Daubigny, Corot, Diaz, Manet, Millet, Rousseau, Troyon, Constable, Gainsborough, Lawrence, Raeburn, Reynolds, Romney, Turner, and Whistler.

The chief artistic feature of the interior decorations of the house, which, with the land upon which it is placed, cost, in round figures, five millions of dollars, is the famous series of Fragonard Panels, in the drawing-room.