The Hill-Stead Museum

After the Saturday party at my sister Joan's we drove up to Meriden and stayed overnight.  Then on Sunday we couldn't check into the Lake house, so we found this museum, and stopped to visit.  Unfortunately, there were no openings on the tours of the house, so we could only wander the grounds, but that wasn't a bad thing, because there was no entrance fee, if you did not take the house tour.

Hill–Stead Museum is a Colonial Revival house and art museum set on a large estate in Farmington, Connecticut. It is best known for its French Impressionist masterpieces, architecture, and stately grounds. The property was designated a National Historic Landmark as a nationally significant example of Colonial Revival architecture, built in 1901 to designs that were the result of a unique collaboration between Theodate Pope Riddle, one of the United States' first female architects, and the renowned firm of McKim, Mead & White.  This is the beautiful sunken garden, with the "Summer house" in the center.

This is a view of the house from the entrance driveway.  The porch on the left was modeled after Washington's home in Mount Vernon.  It is a huge house of 33,000 square feet.The house is extensively furnished with paintings, prints, objets d'art, and fine furniture and rugs. Highlights of the collection include major paintings by Eugène Carrière, Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet and James McNeill Whistler, among others.

This is one of the roads on the property that leads to some of the barns.

I love this photograph of a barn, because nothing is square in the photo.  That happens to really old buildings as they tend to settle after one hundred years or so.

This view of the buildings shows how it is building after building after building, all connected together.  This is such a normal thing to do in New England architecture.  Apparently the taxes are less if all the buildings are connected together.  This is a wonderful museum and I hope that we get to come back here one day.