Collections - Hill-Stead Museum

About Hill-Stead's Collection

In the late nineteenth century, the new wave of French Impressionist paintings was considered avant-garde. But Hill-Stead was envisioned to be a home as vibrant and interesting as the people who would come to visit. Cleveland iron industrialist Alfred Atmore Pope trusted his instincts and began to collect these new works that would inspire friends, family, and visitors of future generations.

His enterprising vision extended to placing full trust (albeit with tempered and occasional fatherly advice) in his daughter Theodate as architect of choice for the 30,000 square foot homestead, years before she would be recognized as such professionally. Theodate was granted professional recognition by the American Institute of Architects when she became registered, the fifth such female in the country, in 1918.

Hill-Stead is one of the nation’s few remaining representations of early-20th-century Country Place Estates. The museum’s impressive collection includes original furnishings and decorative arts, paintings by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, James M. Whistler and Mary Cassatt, as well as numerous works on paper and Japanese woodblock prints, sculpture, and more.

The Artwork
Alfred Pope was among the earliest American collectors of French Impressionism, building his collection between 1888 and 1907, when this movement was still new and considered radical to the public and critics alike. The paintings at Hill-Stead reflect Mr. Pope’s discerning eye, personal aesthetic and discriminating collecting style. Masterpieces by Edgar Degas and Claude Monet, along with notable works by Mary Cassatt, Edouard Manet, James McNeill Whistler, and others, make the collection at Hill-Stead one of the most significant in the United States.

Mary Cassatt (American, 1844-1926)
Mary Cassatt settled permanently in France in the 1870s when she was in her 30s. There she became friends with Edgar Degas and the Impressionists, and exhibited with them in four of their eight Impressionist Exhibitions held from 1874 to 1886 – the only American artist invited to do so. After 1900, Cassatt became known primarily as a painter of mothers and children.

In Sara Handing a Toy to the Baby, Cassatt employs compositional techniques used in Japanese prints, such as cropping both sides of the picture to give the viewer a glimpse of an intimate moment.

The Popes met Cassatt while she was on a visit to America in 1898. They continued their friendship with her on their visits to France, and hosted her at Hill-Stead in 1908. Mr. Pope began his collection of her work in 1894, eventually acquiring four oils, one pastel and one print. Only Sara Handing a Toy to the Baby and the print, Gathering Fruit, remain in the collection.

Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917)
Considered to be the best draughtsman of his generation, Degas called his work the result of “premeditated instantaneousness.” At least half of the mature work of Degas was devoted to dance subjects, resulting in approximately 1,500 drawings, prints, pastels and paintings. Jockeys and nudes of women bathing were his other popular subjects; all three are represented in Hill-Stead’s collection.

Ten years before Mr. Pope purchased Dancers in Pink from Cottier & Company, New York in 1893, it was exhibited in the Pedestal Fund Art Loan Exhibition in New York to raise money for the pedestal base for the Statue of Liberty. One critic remarked about the “… repulsively real ballet girls [but] magnificently brushed in.” Whether Degas was depicting nudes or dancers, he characteristically drew them in realistic, contemporary settings as opposed to the idealized, classical style that was accepted by the academics of his time.

Édouard Manet (French, 1832-1883)
Édouard Manet never considered himself an Impressionist and refused to show in the seven Impressionist Exhibitions held during his lifetime. Nevertheless, he was considered a leading figure in this avant-garde movement. Although he used classical subjects in his early work, he painted them in a new style, seen as irreverent and unacceptable to the art establishment and critics.

Always an admirer of Velázquez and Goya, Manet was influenced by the Spanish craze that swept Paris upon the arrival of Napoleon III’s Spanish wife, Eugénie. Within two years of the completion of Toreadors, Manet completed 15 other paintings with Spanish subjects and became known as the “Spanish Parisian.” The pendant to Hill-Stead’s oil is The Spanish Ballet (1862), now in The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Manet used some of the same props in both compositions, and both reflect the work of Velázquez in composition and palette.

Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926)
Perhaps best known, and today, most popular among the Impressionist artists, Claude Monet’s early work Impression, Sunrise (1873) lead to the coining of the term. Monet was “keenly attuned to the natural world” and triumphed above early failures and slights to achieve his place in the highly competitive Parisian art world. His career spanned over 60 years evolving from realism uncharacteristic with how we see generally him in our mind’s eye to the mid-career works so well known to the highly abstract late waterlilies. Alfred Pope ultimately purchased nine works by Monet, four of which remain in the collection.