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Wealthy industrialist Alfred Pope built the Hill-Stead House and Museum between 1898 and 1908 as a retirement home for showcasing their exceptional collection of French Impressionist masterpieces and for entertaining their many noteworthy guests.
The house was built to the design their daughter, Theodate Pope Riddle, atop a hill facing northwest with splendid panoramic views of Connecticut's Farmington River Valley and is considered one of the finest examples of Colonial Revival architecture in New England.
Theodate went to school in Farmington, fell in love with the area, and persuaded her father who had earned a fortune in his Cleveland iron foundry business to acquire the real estate and build the home to her specifications in a unique collaboration with the renown architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White.
The two-story white 33,000-square-foot Colonial Revival house was built to mimic the style of the great 18th century farmsteads. It has five bays, a central entrance, low wings, and twin chimneys on a gabled roof. 30 ft mature willow trees were brought in by horses to make the house look as though it had been there since the 1700's, seamlessly blending the house on the hill with the agrarian landscape and original farm buildings on the estate.
The grounds were laid out to take the greatest advantage of the 152 hilltop acres with sunken gardens and reflecting ponds. The original landscaping was by Warren Manning, and included a 6 hole golfway with the ponds being the water hazards.
Since the time of its building, the Hill-Stead House has been packed with one of the finest collections of French Impressionistic Art in America now on display as a museum open to the public. Alfred and Alda Pope began collecting French Impressionistic Art Masterpieces during a grand tour of Europe in 1888, acquiring Claude Monet's View of the Bay and Alps at Antibes. Their collection grew to include many important paintings by Monet, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, James M. Whistler and Mary Cassatt, as well as hundreds of works on paper and Japanese woodblock prints.
The house was built as a planned exhibition of the art they had collected. Alfred and Ada Pope together with their daughter Theodate, who married career-diplomat husband John Wallace Riddle, entertained many of the days most esteemed guests including authors, artists, poets, and presidents.
Henry James the famous novelist wrote of his visit to Hill-Stead in 1904 ".... a great new house on a hilltop that overlooked the most composed of communities; a house apparently conceived -- and with great felicity -- on the lines of a magnified Mount Vernon, and in which an array of modern 'impressionistic' pictures, mainly French, wondrous examples of Manet, of Degas, of Claude Monet, of Whistler, of other rare recent hands, treated us to the momentary effect of a large slippery sweet inserted, without a warning, between the compressed lips of half-conscious inanition...no proof of the sovereign power of art could have been, for the moment, sharper...it was like the sudden trill of a nightingale, lord of the hushed evening."
Theodate inherited the house upon her parents passing, and prior to her own death in 1946 willed Hill-Stead Museum as a memorial to her parents and "for the benefit and enjoyment of the public". She directed that both the house and its contents remain intact, not to be moved, lent, or sold.This has resulted in the preservation of the estate in a manner remarkably unchanged since its owners created and left it with 19 rooms now open to the public packed with antiques and one of the most stunning collections of art in North America.
Today the Hill-Stead House is a National Historic Landmark with over 45,000 visitors a year enjoying the tours, lectures, poetry festivals and school activities.The estates also include an 18th Century Farmhouse, an Arts & Crafts Carriage Barn, woodland trails and a theater built in 1917 to show motion pictures to the Farmington community. It is a stop on the Connecticut Art Trail, a member of Connecticut's Historic Gardens and an official project for Save America's Treasures.
Hill-Stead House and Museum is located atop 152 beautiful hilltop acres at 35 Mountain Road, in Farmington, Connecticut 06032. The telephone number is: 860-677-4787. For more information including the hours the estate is open to the public please visit the Hills-Stead House and Museum website at http://www.hillstead.org
