On December 27, 2005, Kay Greathouse, director of the Frye Art Museum from 1966 to 1994, celebrates her one-hundredth birthday. The Frye would not exist as the cultural center it is today without her commitment and leadership.

Ida Kay Myers was born and raised in Bellingham, Washington. She moved to Seattle in 1927, where she held a number of jobs before and during the Depression, one of which was located in the building where Walser Sly Greathouse practiced law. They married, and within a few years found the future course of their lives determined by their association with Charles Frye. Walser was Charles Frye’s attorney, and upon the latter’s death in 1940 he became the executor of the Frye estate. Over the subsequent twelve years, Walser Greathouse worked to salvage and once again make profitable Frye’s business, get the estate out of debt, and create the Charles and Emma Frye Art Museum to house the couple’s collection of 232 paintings.

While preserving and housing the Frye’s collection, through what Kay Greathouse called “. . . a life of
dedication to work,” the Greathouses also left their own legacy adding to the collection important landscapes, interiors, and still lifes. Kay, in particular, traveled extensively, visiting museums and artists around the United States and Europe, and expanded the founding collection of primarily nineteeth-century Austrian and German art to include nineteenth and twentieth-century American

Del Gish (b. 1936), Portrait of Ida Kay Greathouse, 2004, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in., museum purchase, 2004

artists including John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase, Edward Hopper, and Andrew Wyeth, as well as contemporary Northwest artists such as William Cumming.

Kay succeeded Walser as director and executor of the Frye estate following his death in 1966. She proved intrepid at the helm, leaving a stamp on the Museum through her keen eye, conservative fiscal management, strength of character, and directorial style. Please join the Frye in saluting Kay Greathouse on her centenary birthday. And look for an exhibition in 2007 celebrating her contributions to the Frye.

A recent article in Tacoma’s News Tribune identified the Museum’s chairs, such as the one Ida Kay Greathouse is sitting in, as “confidantes,” or clover-shaped triple chairs that were used in the center of parlors (as they were in Charles and Emma Frye’s home) or in hotel lobbies. Three people sit in the chair, facing different directions, and then lean toward the center to talk. Over the centuries, this uniquely shaped settee has gone by different names. It was called the confidante when it first appeared in the 1750s; the English referred to it as the “roundabout conversation chair;” and then it was renamed “tête-à-tête” in the twentieth century. The chair, popular during Victorian days, is no longer made.