Cone sisters

Claribel Cone (1864–1929) and Etta Cone (1870–1949), collectively known as the Cone sisters, were active as American art collectors, world travelers, and socialites during the first part of the 20th century. Claribel trained as a physician and Etta as a pianist. Their social circle included Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein. They gathered one of the best known private collections of modern art in the United States at their Baltimore apartments, and the collection now makes up a wing of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Their collection was estimated to be worth almost a billion US dollars in 2002. Early life The Cones' parents were Herman (Kahn) Cone and Helen (Guggenheimer) Cone, who were German-Jewish immigrants. Herman, who had immigrated from Altenstadt in Bavaria (South of Ulm), anglicized his last name (changing it from "Kahn" to "Cone") almost immediately upon arrival in the United States in 1845. Until 1871, the family lived in Jonesboro, Tennessee, where they had a successful grocery business. Claribel and Etta were born in Tennessee. Claribel, the fifth child in the family of thirteen children, was born November 14, 1864. Etta, the ninth child in the family, was born November 30, 1870. The family then moved to Baltimore, Maryland. The eldest Cone brothers, Moses and Ceasar, later moved permanently to Greensboro, North Carolina. They established a textile manufacturing business named the Proximity Manufacturing Company (later known as Cone Mills Corporation, now a unit of International Textile Group). The textile mills that their brothers started would make the Cone sisters wealthy, as Moses and Ceasar shared in their financial success with their siblings. The Cone sisters graduated from the Western Female High School. Against family wishes, Claribel studied at the Women's Medical College of Baltimore. She graduated in 1890 and completed an internship at Blockley Hospital for the Insane in Philadelphia. She then worked in the pathology laboratory of the Johns Hopkins Medical School and did postgraduate work at the University of Pennsylvania with the ambition of becoming a medical doctor, but ultimately never practiced clinical medicine. Claribel focused instead on teaching and research as a professor of pathology for 25 years at the Women's Medical College. Etta was a pianist and managed the family household affairs. The sisters traveled to Europe together yearly on long trips beginning in 1901.