Hill-Stead Museum

Hill-Stead Museum offers visitors an intimate encounter with three remarkable masterworks: an extraordinary collection of Impressionist paintings, a sprawling natural estate, and the impressive architectural design of the museum’s founder, Theodate Pope Riddle (1867-1946). Hill-Stead is the first architecture project by Pope Riddle, one of the earliest licensed female architects in the United States. Designed in the late 1890s as a home for her parents and a showcase for her father’s growing art collection, the Colonial Revival mansion in Farmington, Connecticut, has welcomed more than a million visitors since it opened to the public in 1947, and it is one of the nation’s few remaining early-twentieth-century country estates. As a house museum, Hill-Stead offers a view of period furnishings, textiles, prints, books, and fine and decorative arts as they were enjoyed by the Pope family, including masterpieces by Monet, Degas, Whistler, Manet, and Cassatt that rival those in major art museums around the world. The 1901 mansion and its connected outbuildings are set within a 152-acre green space that includes a formal perennial garden, walking trails, and remnants of the original farm complex.

Alfred Atmore Pope (1842–1913), Theodate’s father, was among the vanguard of American collectors of modern French art. In his active collecting years, between 1889 and 1907, he amassed more than forty paintings, the vast majority of which were Impressionist. Because of Pope’s careful pruning and his daughter’s subsequent sales, only a small portion of his collection may be seen at Hill-Stead today, but this includes some of the finest works he owned. While Pope, who had no formal training in the arts, did not rely on any official advisor, recent scholarship has revealed that the artist Mary Cassatt—whom the Pope family befriended in the late 1890s—played a pivotal role in at least one of his acquisitions, and Pope also had a richly rewarding relationship with the artist James McNeill Whistler. Unlike his more well known collecting peers—such as Louisine and H. O. Havemeyer of New York and Bertha and Potter Palmer of Chicago—who had massive collections that ran the gamut of modern and historical movements, Pope focused solely on contemporary art at the dawn of Impressionism’s recognition in the United States.

The dynamic father-daughter duo at the heart of Hill-Stead’s story believed that well-being could be achieved through cultivating the life of the mind and engaging in a direct relationship with nature. Thanks to their extraordinary home and the other resources—both artistic and natural—they acquired and transformed, Hill-Stead today promotes their legacy. The grounds, the architecture, and the art collection provide countless opportunities to interpret and share their riches with visitors of all ages and walks of life.