Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT, Worth the Trip

Most things change dramatically, but not Farmington’s Hill-Stead Museum.

I first visited the museum many moons ago when doing a story on Connecticut art museums for Yankee magazine’s travel guide. Hill-Stead is a home — 152-acre farmstead built about 1900 — tucked in the hills overlooking the Farmington Valley where almost nothing has changed since owner and architect Theodate Pope Riddle died in the 1940s. That’s because her will, leaving the house as a museum in her parent’s memory, stipulated that everything stays put!

You can enjoy original works seen nowhere but here.  Collections include original furnishings, 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.  Theodate’s father, Cleveland iron industrialist Alfred A Pope, was an avid art and antique collector — his is the only surviving and intact Impressionist painting collection amassed by an American patron.

I  spent much of my visit tootling around the dining room and butler’s pantry where Theodate thought through each detail. For instance, the servants could tell whether diners were done with the course without ever entering the room. Standing in the hallway to the dining room, the servants could look at a convex mirror on the wall in the far side of the dining room and see the table (their view in photo below).  Smart lady.

If you go, be sure to take a guided tour, as the docents are incredibly knowledgeable. Our guide was Ann Mangini (mother of Cleveland Brown’s coach Eric), who I learned returned to school recently to study art history, and received her associates degree — with honors — from Tunxis Community College. She was 69 at graduation in 2007.

Wanting to get a bite to eat after walking the outside grounds, we headed to Apricots as it was just a couple miles away. The Apricots I recalled had fabulous food that we could enjoy while dining along side the Farmington River. The river was (obviously) still there, but oh, how the mighty have fallen. The food was mediocre, but fine for a mid-afternoon nibble.