Alfred Amore Pope, seated

During his active collecting years (1889-1907) Alfred Atmore Pope, who was in the vanguard of the early American collectors of modern French paintings, amassed some 40+ works of art, the vast majority of which were Impressionist. Due to Pope’s ​careful pruning through ​sales and exchanges, ​in order to retain only those works that elicited a profound emotional reaction, and his daughter’s subsequent dispositions, only a small fraction—albeit perhaps some of the finest—are part of Hill-Stead Museum’s collection today. While Pope, who hailed from modest means and had no formal background or training in the arts, honed his eye and did not rely on an advisor in any official capacity, recent scholarship shows that Mary Cassatt, whom the family met in the latter 1890s and knew on a deeply personal level, played a pivotal role in at least one acquisition. Pope also came to have a richly rewarding relationship with Whistler but frequently followed his own instincts rather than bowing to Whistler’s recommendations. Unlike his more well-known contemporaries, Louisine and H. O. Havemeyer of New York and Betha and Potter Palmer of Chicago, who had massive collections that ran the gamut of movements, Pope was focused on contemporary art at the dawn of French Impressionism’s foothold in America.
Today, Hill-Stead houses his Impressionist collection, including singular examples by Manet, Monet and Degas.