Frye Art Museum

About this audio guide

This guide to the Frye Art Museum in Seattle follows Charles and Emma Frye, who built their fortune running a meatpacking plant and quietly filled their own house with German and Austrian oil paintings, open to factory workers and touring artists alike. It turns to February eighteenth, nineteen forty-three, when Boeing test pilot Eddie Allen took a prototype bomber up over the city on what began as an ordinary flight, and fuel leaking inside a wing caught fire as he tried to bring it home. The paintings, stored elsewhere that day, were untouched. You'll hear about the unusual will Charles left behind years later, and the terms the Seattle Art Museum wouldn't agree to. Look around this gallery, built in nineteen fifty-two, before you head inside.