Claribel Cone and Etta Cone
Baltimore, Baltimore, Maryland
Marker Inscription
The Cone sisters Claribel Cone, MD (1864-1929) Etta Cone (1870-1949) Early collectors of Matisse, Picasso, and other modern artists. Their preeminent collection, housed in two apartments here, now fills the Baltimore Museum of Art's Cone Wing.
Erected by Bolton Hill Historic District
The Story
Baltimore sisters Claribel and Etta Cone traveled to Paris in the early 20th century and began buying the work of then-controversial modern painters like Matisse and Picasso, long before American museums took them seriously. They filled two adjoining apartments here with one of the finest private collections of modern art in the country. That collection now anchors the Baltimore Museum of Art's Cone Wing.
Why it matters
The Cones were pioneering American tastemakers whose eye for the avant-garde helped bring modern European art into the nation's cultural mainstream.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
At the turn of the twentieth century, Baltimore was a prosperous, buttoned-up American city, and Bolton Hill was one of its most gracious neighborhoods—rows of dignified brick townhouses, marble steps, and the quiet confidence of families who had done well in trade and industry. It was a world of settled tastes, where "art" on a parlor wall generally meant something reassuring and familiar.
Across the ocean, though, the ground was shifting. In the first years of the 1900s, Paris was becoming the crucible of modern art. A generation of painters was tearing up the rulebook—flattening perspective, unleashing color, breaking the human figure into planes. To most respectable Americans, this new work looked like a joke or an insult. It would be years before major U.S. museums treated it as anything but a scandal.
Into that gap stepped two sisters from Baltimore who had both the means and the nerve to see things differently.
People & events
Claribel and Etta Cone came from a large, well-off Baltimore family. Claribel trained as a physician—no small feat for a woman of her generation—while Etta had a gift for looking closely and choosing well. Beginning in the early years of the century, their travels took them to Paris, where they moved in circles that put them face to face with the very artists reshaping Western painting.
There they began to buy. Where others saw ugliness or provocation, the Cones saw the future, and they acquired the work of Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and their contemporaries while those names still made polite collectors nervous. Matisse in particular became a lifelong presence in their lives, and over the decades the sisters assembled a body of his work of extraordinary depth.
Back home, they filled two adjoining apartments in this neighborhood with what they had gathered—paintings, drawings, sculpture, textiles, and objects—until their rooms became something close to a private museum. What began as the enthusiasm of two travelers became, over a lifetime, one of the great American collections of modern art.
Its place in the American story
The story of modern art in America is often told through big institutions and famous exhibitions. But behind those milestones stand individual collectors who bought the work early, when doing so took conviction rather than consensus. The Cone sisters were among the most important of them.
By backing living, controversial artists decades before American taste caught up, they helped build the bridge that carried European modernism into the national mainstream. Private eyes like theirs did what museums were not yet willing to do: they treated this new art as serious, worth living with, worth preserving.
Their collection did not stay private. It became the heart of the Baltimore Museum of Art's Cone Wing, turning a personal passion into a public inheritance—proof that two women from a Baltimore neighborhood could shape how a whole country came to see the art of its century.
If you visit
Stand on this block and picture it as a home first, not a gallery. The marvel here is that world-changing paintings once hung in ordinary apartment rooms—works that scholars now travel across the country to study were simply part of two sisters' daily surroundings.
The neighborhood itself rewards a slow walk. Bolton Hill keeps its nineteenth-century character in its brickwork, its tall windows, and its tree-lined calm, and it's easy to imagine the sisters coming and going with their latest finds from abroad.
To complete the story, pair a stroll here with a visit to the Baltimore Museum of Art, where the Cone collection lives on. Seeing the marker and then the paintings—the modest doorway and the masterpieces it once held—turns an afternoon into a journey through how America learned to love modern art.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Claribel Cone
- · Etta Cone
Themes & tags
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