Schwestern Cone

The Cone sisters were Claribel Cone (1864–1929) and Etta Cone (1870–1949) who gathered together one of the finest collections of modern French art in the United States. They were wealthy socialites during the Guilded Age.

Claribel Cone, Gertrude Stein, Etta Cone 1903

Early life

Their parents were Herman (Kahn) Cone and Helen (Guggenheimer) Cone who were German-Jewish immigrants. Herman changed his last name from Kahn to "Cone" almost immediately upon arrival in the United States to become more American. The family lived in Jonesboro, Tennessee until 1871 where they had a successful grocery business. This is where the first five children of twelve were born, including the Cone sisters. They then moved to Baltimore, Maryland.

The eldest Cone brothers (Moses and Ceasar) later relocated to Greensboro, North Carolina. They established a textile business named Proximity Manufacturing Company (now known as Cone Mills Corporation). During World War I the textile mills that "Brother Moses" started would again increase their fortunes.

The two sisters, one with a grander personage and independent, the other garrulous and sociable, lived in adjoining apartments on Eutaw Street in Baltimore for 50 years. They both graduated from Western Female High School. Claribel became a physician and pathologist. She attended Woman's Medical College of Baltimore and graduated in 1890. She then worked in the pathology laboratory of the Johns Hopkins Medical School. Claribel became a pathologist but never practiced medicine. However, she did teach pathology and continued to study with other European researchers over the next twenty years. Claribel became known as Dr. Claribel. Etta become an amateur musician as a pianist and managed the family household as more an implementer of her sister's ideas. They traveled extensively to Europe together from the United States almost yearly on long trips starting in 1901.

Career of the sisters

The Cone sisters were friends of literary illuminati like Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. They also intermingle with Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.

It was Etta who began purchasing artwork in 1898 when she was given three hundred dollars to decorate the family home by an older brother. She started with five paintings by Theodore Robinson. This then become a lifetime of collecting of fine artwork acquiring art sporadically. Her tastes tended toward the conservative.

One day in 1905 while the Cone sisters were on a European holiday they visited the Steins in Paris. Etta was then introduced to Picasso and then to Matisse the next year, marking her lifelong love of his art. Etta would make small acquisitions to help up-and-coming artists like Matisse, Picasso, and other students of the Maryland Institute College of Art. She also would buy at very low prices from the Steins who were in need of money and was known to get discarded drawings in Picasso's studio for $2 or $3 apiece.

Claribel purchased much more avant-garde works that were on the opposite spectrum of Etta's purchasing. She purchased Matisse’s Blue Nude (120,760 francs) and Paul Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen From the Bibemus Quarry (410,000 francs) for their collection. Etta was much more conservative and would spend something like 10,000 francs for a painting or a group of drawings. The Cone sisters had a special interest in Matisse's Nice period.

Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo Stein were orphaned and moved to Baltimore to live with an aunt. They soon became part of the Cone sisters social crowd. During Claribel’s time at the Women’s Medical College of John Hopkins University, Gertrude was also studying there. There was big age gap between Claribel and Gertrude. These unconventional women were drawn to each other, however, by their common interest in music, fine artwork, and socialable conversations. Etta credited Leo for helping her develop an eye for modern art. Etta was reserved and conservative. She was awe struck by Gertrude’s Bohemian lifestyle and there are even hints that they were very likely lovers at some point. That relationship cooled, however, after Toklas came on the scene.

Stein wrote about Etta and Claribel in Two Women: "There were two of them, they were sisters, they were large women, they were rich, they were very different one from the other one."

Social status

Their particular social contacts produced an advantage from which they could compile a world renown art collection. The Cone sisters compiled a large collection of paintings and sculptures by Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Paul Cézanne. The Cone sisters never married. This was the case for about ten percent of women during this time period. Customary of their rank in society, they traveled extensively within the company of other women. Claribel’s pursuit of a medical degree was considered unlady-like in her social standings. The Cone sisters use of the family’s prosperity to collect fine artwork was unparalleled among other women. They were known as eccentrics and had a comical presence clad in their long Victorian dresses. When they went to the opera in Paris they would buy an extra seat to hold their day's purchases.

The Cone sisters purchases were inspired by romantic charity, more frequently than not, rather than a true desire to compile a collection of fine artwork. They would purchase portraits and other paintings for decoration just to cover wall space of their Marlborough apartments in Baltimore. The sisters' nephew once commented on this display, The pictures covered every available inch of wall space, even in the bathrooms. It wasn’t until Claribel’s early death from pneumonia that Etta sought professional advice on purchasing fine artwork to be held in public trust. Claribel had willed her paintings to Etta, stipulating that these fine artwork pieces should eventually be given to the Baltimore Museum of Art if the spirit of appreciation of modern art in Baltimore should improve.

Cone Collection

The Cone Collection includes fine artwork and masterpieces from world famous artists. They include Matisse's Blue Nude (1907) and Large Reclining Nude (1935), Paul Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibémus Quarry (c. 1897), Paul Gauguin’s Vahine no te vi (Woman of the Mango) (1892), and Pablo Picasso’s Mother and Child (1922). The Cone sisters collected throughout Matisse’s career 42 of his oil paintings, 18 sculptures, 36 drawings, 155 prints, and seven illustrated books, as well as 250 drawings, prints, and copper plates from Matisse’s first illustrated book, Poésies de Stéphane Mallarmé. Other Matisse works they acquired were the 1917 Woman in a Turban (Lorette), Seated Odalisque, Left Knee Bent, Ornamental Background and Checkerboard (1928), and Interior, Flowers and Parakeets (1924). The 500 works by Matisse in the Cone Collection are considered the largest and most significant in the world.

The Cone sisters purchased and acquired many of Picasso's works. Among these were 114 of his prints and drawings from his early years in Barcelona of his Rose period (1905–1906) in Paris. The Cone sisters also purchased fine artwork done by American artists. This American work consisted of more than 1,000 prints, illustrated books, and drawings. Among these were also a large group of textiles; jewelry, furniture, and other decorative arts. They not only purchased the finest European and Asian artwork, but also Egyptian sculpture, Middle Eastern textiles, Indian metalwork, 18th-century French jewelry, Japanese prints, and African sculpture. Upon Etta’s death in 1949 the Cone Collection, one of the finest in the world, was donated to the Baltimore Museum of Art. The Cone Wing contains over 3000 works. The estimated value today of the Cone Collection is one billion dollars.

Other collections

The Cone sisters had a second collection of fine artwork hardly known internationally. This second art collection is at the Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. The reason it is here instead of a cosmopolitian world renown city is because the Cone Mills are located there. These mills play a large part in the local history and the Cone sisters' wealth. Moses H. Cone started these mills and had the vacation home Flat Top Manor in nearby Blowing Rock, North Carolina. The Cone sisters ofter visited their famous brother there.

Other visitors were Julius Cone and his wife Laura Weil, Etta's sister-in-law. Laura Cone was a loyal alumna of University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Etta knew that the Weatherspoon Art Gallery had been established on campus in 1942 and that the organization was struggling to get established. Laura Cone asked her socialite sister-in-law, Etta, if she would consider making a donation of art. In her will dated May 18, 1949, Etta left an astonishing collection to the Weatherspoon Art Gallery of sixty-seven Matisse prints and six Matisse bronzes as well as a large number of modern prints and drawings, including works by Pablo Picasso, Felix Vallaton, Raoul Dufy, and John Graham.

Primary sources

• The Cone Collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art, 2001, Baltimore Museum of Art, Cone Archives.
• Kirwin, Liza, Correspondence of Claribel and Etta Cone. , 1987, Archives of American Art Journal. V. 27 No. 2(1987) p. 34.
• Will of Dr. Claribel Cone, April 25, 1929, Maryland State Archives, Baltimore City, Register of Wills - serial #10225, folio #531, Book #165, Case #447, p. 61.
• Will of Etta Cone, May 18, 1949, Maryland State Archives, Baltimore City, Register of Wills - serial #52036, folio #35, Book #233, CR 232, case #690, p.35
• Probate inventory Claribel Cone, Maryland State Archives, Baltimore City, Register of Wills - serial #10225, folio #315, Book #257.
• Probate inventory of Etta Cone, Maryland State Archives, Baltimore City, Register of Wills - serial #52036, folio #14, Book #308.
• Dr. Claribel Cone, A Remarkable Woman, April 8, 1911, The Baltimore Evening Sun, Interview on microfilm at the Enoch Pratt Library, Morgan State University, and University of Maryland Baltimore County, and University of Maryland, College Park.

Secondary sources

• Pollack, Barbara. The Collectors: Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta Cone. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962.
• Gabriel, Mary. The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta & Claribel Cone. Baltimore: Bancroft Press, 2002.
• Cordell, Eugene F. Medical Annals of Maryland. Baltimore: Medical and Chirurgical Society of Maryland, 1903.
• Abrahams, Harold J. Extinct Medical Schools of Baltimore, Maryland. Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1969.
• Richardson, Brenda and William C. Ameringer. Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta. Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1985.
• Cone, Edward T. The Miss Etta Cones, The Steins, and M’sieu Matisse: A Memoir. The American Scholar. Summer 1973 (vol. 42, no. 3) pp.441–460.
• Noblitt, Philip T., A Mansion in the Mountains: The Story of Moses and Bertha Cone and their Blowing Rock Manor, Parkway Publishers 1996, ISBN 1887905022
• Hirschland, Ellen B. The Cone Sisters and the Stein Family. Four Americans in Paris: The Collections of Gertrude Stein and her Family. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1970.