08 June 2011

Hill-Stead, Farmington, Connecticut

Hill-Stead Estate, now a museum, was created by industrialist Alfred A. Pope at the end of the Nineteenth Century as a retirement home and working farm. Located just east of the village of Farmington, Connecticut, the estate comprised 250 acres of farm land and forest. Pope's daughter Theodate, one of the first woman architects in the United States, designed and sited the buildings, and laid out the grounds. As with the Philip Johnson Glass House Site in New Canaan and Weir Farm in Wilton, Hill-Stead presents an example of a natural setting selected, tended, and to some extent sculpted by an artist with unusual sensitivity to nature and a visitor's place within it.

This photograph was chosen particularly for the mosaic of light and shadow in the foreground and middle ground created by clouds scudding across the sun at the moment of exposure. The shadows give additional articulation to elements of the scene.


Hill-Stead, View to the North