The Marlborough apartments in Baltimore, where the Cone sisters lived. The apartments were converted to senior housing in the 1970s, though they’ve since diversified.
Etta and Claribel Cone, the Baltimore sisters whose Matisse collection is on view at the MIA for just a couple more weeks, weren’t exclusively Matisse fans, of course. Though that collection, some 500 of his paintings, drawings, illustrated books, and more, would have been enough to fill their shared apartments. They also had 17 paintings, 43 drawings, and two bronzes by Picasso, 70 major works by other modern artists, and many more artworks—3,000 altogether. All of it crammed into their quarters, one way or another.
Much of it was not displayed. But a lot of it was. On the tables, on the walls from floor to ceiling, on every conceivable surface. In fact, when Matisse realized the ladies were becoming his greatest collectors, he began to size his works appropriately for their apartments. Claribel died in 1929, but Etta eventually rented two adjacent apartments, one as a personal gallery.
The sisters’ apartments were in the Marlborough, a 10-story, Beaux Arts brickpile that lords over northwest Baltimore like a sphinx, the horizon lanced with synagogue minarets and church steeples, the streets crowded with three-story rowhouses. In the 1970s, the building became senior housing, gutted and broken into 287 units. But back in the 1930s, there were just 122 apartments on 10 floors, home to some of the city’s most prominent Jewish families.
The Cone sisters’ art collection, most of their furniture, and other possessions were donated to the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1950. About 15 years ago, the museum commissioned the Imaging Research Center to recreate the sisters’ apartments in their heyday, a kind of 3-D immersive video experience. The walls were virtually reconstructed and more than 600 objects were recreated, modeled to appear three-dimensional. The virtual tour, updated in 2010, has been a part of the Cone Collection display at the museum ever since.
Here, in a YouTube video, you can experience the virtual tour for yourself:
Recently, the sisters’ great-great niece Nancy Ramage, an art historian, visited the MIA to talk about her famous relatives. She wrote The Cone Sisters of Baltimore: Collecting at Full Tilt, published in 2008, with her mother, also an art historian. Here, she talks with writer Diane Richard about her memories of the Cones and their apartments—”the sense of crowdedness.”