Constructed between 1898 and 1901, the Pope Riddle House, centerpiece of the Hill-Stead estate in Farmington, was constructed as a retirement home for the industrialist and art collector Alfred Atmore Pope and his wife, Ada Lunette Brooks. It was designed by their daughter, Theodate Pope Riddle, working with Edgerton Swartout, an architect with the firm of McKim, Mead, and White. Gaining a valuable apprenticeship in architecture through this experience, she would go on to design many buildings over the next 30 years, including the 1920 reconstruction of the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace in New York and the Avon Old Farms School, which she founded.
Once described by Henry James as, “a great new house on a hilltop,” the Colonial Revival-style building combines various influences, from the traditional New England farm house to George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Various additions were made in the following years by Theodate Pope Riddle (who married diplomat John Wallace Riddle in 1916). She later inherited the house and left the estate to become a museum after her own death in 1946.
The museum showcases Alfred Pope’s art collection. Begun in the 1880s, it includes works on paper, Japanese woodblock prints, and Impressionist paintings by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Mary Cassatt and James M. Whistler. It was featured in the 1907 book, Noteworthy Paintings in American Collections, edited by John LaFarge and August Jaccaci.