CHARLES RYSKAMP (1928–2010)

Charles Ryskamp, a literary scholar and art collector who was the director of two of New York’s most prestigious small museums, the Pierpont Morgan Library and the Frick Collection, for nearly thirty years, died Friday in Manhattan, William Grimes reports for the New York Times. He was eighty-one and lived in Manhattan and Princeton, New Jersey. The cause was cancer, said Anne L. Poulet, the director of the Frick.

Ryskamp, a specialist in eighteenth-century British literature who taught at Princeton, was appointed director of the Morgan Library (now the Morgan Library and Museum) in 1969. In 1987, Ryskamp became director of the Frick, where he was an animating presence, increasing the number of exhibitions and broadening their scope. He retired from the Frick in 1997.

Ryskamp increased the Morgan’s endowment in the 1980s from about $11 million to more than $38 million. He proved to be a potent fundraiser at the Frick too, where he faced a crisis after the death of Helen Clay Frick, the daughter of Henry Frick, in 1984. She had created the Frick’s renowned art-reference library, supported its operations out of her own pocket, but failed to provide an endowment for it in her will. Leading the Frick’s first capital campaign, Ryskamp raised $34 million, enough to head off the threatened closing of the library and assure its future.