Alfred Atmore Pope

Pope entered the firm as secretary and treasurer and within ten years rose to the rank of president, an office he held until his death in 1913.

As his company and personal wealth grew, Pope moved his family up the ladder of Cleveland society and eventually built a Richardsonian Romanesque townhouse on Euclid Avenue in one of the city's most fashionable districts.

During the next two decades he acquired pictures by Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, as well as James McNeill Whistler and Mary Cassatt, thus becoming one of the earliest American collectors of Impressionist paintings.

Ultimately, though he did entertain the advice of others with regard to his purchases, Alfred Pope relied on his own judgement to guide him to works that would both satisfy his personal aesthetic and contribute to the harmony of his surroundings.

Alfred Pope's collection of paintings was relatively small compared with those of some of his American contemporaries, but its reputation grew as he began to lend to exhibitions in Cleveland, New York and Boston.

They bought majolica and frames in Venice, and a Roman bust from an Italian dealer; Whistler and Charles Méryon prints, a boulle inkstand, mahogany liquor case, Persian rugs and a William Morris tapestry based on Walter Crane's The Goose Girl in London; and in Paris a Venetian mirror, Antoine-Louis Barye bronzes, Japanese prints and three Monets from leading art dealers Boussoud, Valadon.

With his acquisition of Japanese prints and Chinese porcelain, Alfred Pope was following a fashionable trend of the last decades of the nineteenth century when Asian objects became popular adornments in American homes.