Alfred Atmore Pope
Encyclopedia
Theodate Pope Riddle
Theodate Pope Riddle was an American architect. She was one of the first American women architects as well as a survivor of the Lusitania.-Life:...
, a noted American architect.
Family background
Alfred Pope’s ancestors came to the New World from Yorkshire, EnglandEngland
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
in 1634 and settled in West Danvers, Massachusetts. Pope’s father Alton was a successful woolen goods manufacturer, winning prizes for his mill’s samples during The Great Exhibition
The Great Exhibition
The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations or The Great Exhibition, sometimes referred to as the Crystal Palace Exhibition in reference to the temporary structure in which it was held, was an international exhibition that took place in Hyde Park, London, from 1 May to 15 October...
at The Crystal Palace
The Crystal Palace
The Crystal Palace was a cast-iron and glass building originally erected in Hyde Park, London, England, to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. More than 14,000 exhibitors from around the world gathered in the Palace's of exhibition space to display examples of the latest technology developed in...
in 1851. In 1861 he moved his family to Baltimore and then to Salem, Ohio, an old Quaker town in the Connecticut Western Reserve
Connecticut Western Reserve
The Connecticut Western Reserve was land claimed by Connecticut from 1662 to 1800 in the Northwest Territory in what is now northeastern Ohio.-History:...
. Later in Cleveland, Alton set up a woolen business again with his sons as partners. In 1862, Alfred Pope joined the firm of Alton Pope and Sons and in 1866 married Ada Lunette Brooks of Salem, whose family, like his, had roots in New England. The couple’s only child, Theodate, was born one year later.
Business career
In 1869 Alfred Pope left the family business and, with loans from his brother-in-law Joshua Brooks and others, bought into the Cleveland Malleable Iron Company, a concern which had been formed a year earlier by five Cleveland men. Pope entered the firm as secretary and treasurer and within ten years rose to the rank of president, an office he held until his death in 1913. With the rapid industrialization and urbanization of the country, malleable ironMalleable iron
Malleable iron is cast as White iron, the structure being a metastable carbide in a pearlitic matrix. Through an annealing heat treatment the brittle as cast structure is transformed. Carbon agglomerates into small roughly speherical aggregates of graphite leaving a matrix of ferrite or pearlite...
– a form of metal exceptionally stronger than forged
Forging
Forging is a manufacturing process involving the shaping of metal using localized compressive forces. Forging is often classified according to the temperature at which it is performed: '"cold," "warm," or "hot" forging. Forged parts can range in weight from less than a kilogram to 580 metric tons...
iron – became an important commodity in the construction industry. Under Pope’s leadership the Cleveland Company eventually expanded to include a group of six malleable iron and steel castings plants in the mid-west, known as the National Malleable Castings Company. He was also involved with several other manufacturing enterprises and financial institutions. As his company and personal wealth grew, Pope moved his family up the ladder of Cleveland society and eventually built a Richardsonian Romanesque
Richardsonian Romanesque
Richardsonian Romanesque is a style of Romanesque Revival architecture named after architect Henry Hobson Richardson, whose masterpiece is Trinity Church, Boston , designated a National Historic Landmark...
townhouse on Euclid Avenue in one of the city’s most fashionable districts. John D. Rockefeller
John D. Rockefeller
John Davison Rockefeller was an American oil industrialist, investor, and philanthropist. He was the founder of the Standard Oil Company, which dominated the oil industry and was the first great U.S. business trust. Rockefeller revolutionized the petroleum industry and defined the structure of...
was among his neighbors.
Art collection
In the last years of the 1880's Alfred Pope emerged as a serious collector of paintings and other works of art. During the next two decades he acquired pictures by Édouard ManetÉdouard Manet
Édouard Manet was a French painter. One of the first 19th-century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism....
, Claude Monet
Claude Monet
Claude Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. . Retrieved 6 January 2007...
, Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas[p] , born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist...
, Camille Pissarro
Camille Pissarro
Camille Pissarro was a French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas . His importance resides in his contributions to both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, as he was the only artist to exhibit in both forms...
and Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty, and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that "Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to...
, as well as James McNeill Whistler
James McNeill Whistler
James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American-born, British-based artist. Averse to sentimentality and moral allusion in painting, he was a leading proponent of the credo "art for art's sake". His famous signature for his paintings was in the shape of a stylized butterfly possessing a long stinger...
and Mary Cassatt
Mary Cassatt
Mary Stevenson Cassatt was an American painter and printmaker. She lived much of her adult life in France, where she first befriended Edgar Degas and later exhibited among the Impressionists...
, thus becoming one of the earliest American collectors of Impressionist paintings. While it is not possible to identify any one impetus behind his collecting, his close friend and business colleague J.H. Whittemore and his son Harris were both buying Impressionist paintings at this time, and the Pope and Whittemore collections in many ways paralleled one another. The counsel of several artists also had an influence on Pope's growing collection. In particular he acknowledged his debt to Whistler, whom he first met in Paris in 1894, writing to him in October of that year on his return to New York “Our horizon was enlarged, taste refined, and love of the beautiful nourished by our good fortune in meeting the Whistlers.” Whistler had not only recommended where Pope see his own paintings in London with the idea of purchasing them (Pope already owned several Whistler prints and had just bought The Blue Wave, Biarritz), but the painter also directed him to a shop, Parke’s on Vigo Street, where they could see “beautiful old settings–rugs–baskets and the rest of it that Mrs. Pope and your daughter Theodate will delight in.” Ultimately, though he did entertain the advice of others with regard to his purchases, Alfred Pope relied on his own judgement to guide him to works that would both satisfy his personal aesthetic and contribute to the harmony of his surroundings.
Alfred Pope’s collection of paintings was relatively small compared with those of some of his American contemporaries, but its reputation grew as he began to lend to exhibitions in Cleveland, New York and Boston. Two of his Monets and a Degas made an especially strong impact at the Cleveland Art Loan Exhibition of 1894. Later his collection was among those chosen by Auguste F. Jaccaci and John La Farge for inclusion in Concerning Noteworthy Paintings in American Private Collections, a lavish fifteen-volume project of which only two volumes appeared. In 1910 the Pope collection was featured with that of Harris Whittemore and others in an article in The Burlington Magazine
The Burlington Magazine
The Burlington Magazine is a monthly academic journal that covers the fine and decorative arts. It is the longest running art journal in the English language and it is a charitable organisation since 1986. It was established in 1903 by a group of art historians and connoisseurs which included Roger...
, French Paintings in American Collections by Dr. E. Waldmann, who pointed out that one had to travel to the United States if one wished to make a serious study of modern painting.
To compliment their paintings, the Popes accumulated an extensive collection of furniture, sculpture, ceramics and silver. Receipts for purchases they made during their European tour of 1888/1889 reveal the typically wide range of their interests. They bought majolica
Maiolica
Maiolica is Italian tin-glazed pottery dating from the Renaissance. It is decorated in bright colours on a white background, frequently depicting historical and legendary scenes.-Name:...
and frames in Venice, and a Roman bust from an Italian dealer; Whistler and Charles Méryon
Charles Méryon
Charles Méryon , was a French artist, who worked almost entirely in etching, as he suffered from colour-blindness. Although now little-known in the English-speaking world, he is generally recognised as the most significant etcher of 19th century France. He also suffered from mental illness, dying...
prints, a boulle inkstand, mahogany liquor case, Persian rugs and a William Morris
William Morris
William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...
tapestry
Tapestry
Tapestry is a form of textile art, traditionally woven on a vertical loom, however it can also be woven on a floor loom as well. It is composed of two sets of interlaced threads, those running parallel to the length and those parallel to the width ; the warp threads are set up under tension on a...
based on Walter Crane's
Walter Crane
Walter Crane was an English artist and book illustrator. He is considered to be the most prolific and influential children’s book creator of his generation and, along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, one of the strongest contributors to the child's nursery motif that the genre of...
The Goose Girl
The Goose Girl
The Goose Girl is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm. Since the second edition published in 1819, The Goose Girl has been recorded as Tale no. 89....
in London; and in Paris a Venetian mirror, Antoine-Louis Barye
Antoine-Louis Barye
Antoine-Louis Barye was a French sculptor most famous for his work as an animalier, a sculptor of animals.-Biography:Born in Paris, Barye began his career as a goldsmith, like many sculptors of the Romantic Period...
bronzes, Japanese prints and three Monets from leading art dealers Boussoud, Valadon. These, their first purchases of French Impressionist paintings, included Monet’s View of Cap d'Antibes, 1888 and Grainstacks, White Frost Effect
Haystacks (Monet)
Haystacks is a title of a series of impressionist paintings by Claude Monet. The primary subjects of all of the paintings in the series are stacks of hay in the field after the harvest season...
, 1889.
With his acquisition of Japanese prints and Chinese porcelain
Chinese porcelain
Chinese ceramic ware shows a continuous development since the pre-dynastic periods, and is one of the most significant forms of Chinese art. China is richly endowed with the raw materials needed for making ceramics. The first types of ceramics were made during the Palaeolithic era...
, Alfred Pope was following a fashionable trend of the last decades of the nineteenth century when Asian objects became popular adornments in American homes. Because of their sympathetic arrangement with paintings and decorative objects on mantelpieces, or their isolated placement on occasional tables, Chinese porcelains played a prominent role in the decoration of the family’s home. In addition, Pope acquired mainstream paintings in the officially sanctioned academic style of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was a French painter, who became the president and co-founder of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and whose work influenced many other artists.-Life:...
and Eugène Carrière
Eugène Carrière
Eugène Anatole Carrière was a French Symbolist artist of the Fin de siècle period. His work is best known for its brown monochrome palette. He was a close friend of the sculptor Rodin and his work influenced Picasso...
as well as numerous decorative arts objects including bronze sculpture, Asian and European porcelains, and Asian, American and European prints - etching
Etching
Etching is the process of using strong acid or mordant to cut into the unprotected parts of a metal surface to create a design in intaglio in the metal...
s, mezzotint
Mezzotint
Mezzotint is a printmaking process of the intaglio family, technically a drypoint method. It was the first tonal method to be used, enabling half-tones to be produced without using line- or dot-based techniques like hatching, cross-hatching or stipple...
s and woodblock
Woodcut
Woodcut—occasionally known as xylography—is a relief printing artistic technique in printmaking in which an image is carved into the surface of a block of wood, with the printing parts remaining level with the surface while the non-printing parts are removed, typically with gouges...
s.
Alfred Pope's interest in Impressionist paintings distinguished him within a select group of connoisseurs at the turn of the twentieth century, making a radical departure from the traditional tastes of many of his peers who acquired only Old Master
Old Master
"Old Master" is a term for a European painter of skill who worked before about 1800, or a painting by such an artist. An "old master print" is an original print made by an artist in the same period...
paintings and drawings. Favoring quality over quantity, Pope took home the best works of art, rather than the most. Today, his noteworthy collection remains on display at his former country estate, Hill-Stead Museum
Hill-Stead Museum
Hill-Stead Museum, also known as Hill-Stead, is a Colonial Revival house and art museum in Farmington, Connecticut, USA. It is best known for its French Impressionist masterpieces, architecture, and stately grounds.-House and museum:...
in Farmington, Connecticut.