Herman, who had immigrated from Altenstadt in Bavaria (South of Ulm), anglicized his last name[2] (changing it from "Kahn" to "Cone") almost immediately upon arrival in the United States in 1845.

[6] The eldest Cone brothers, Moses and Ceasar, later moved permanently to Greensboro, North Carolina.

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.

Claribel focused instead on teaching and research as a professor of pathology for 25 years at the Women's Medical College.

Their social circle included French artist Henri Matisse and Spanish painter Pablo Picasso.

Her tastes at first tended toward the conservative,[10] but one day in 1903, while the Cone sisters were on a European holiday, they visited Stein and her brother in Paris.

[11] Etta was introduced to Picasso, followed by Matisse the next year, marking the beginning of her lifelong love of his art.

[16] Etta made purchases to help upcoming artists like Matisse, Picasso, and students of the Maryland Institute College (MICA).

She also bought at very low prices from the Steins, who were perpetually in need of money and were known to purchase discarded sketches from Picasso at his art studio for two or three dollars apiece.

During Claribel's time at the Women's Medical College of Johns Hopkins University, Gertrude was also studying there.

[18] The Cone sisters built up a large collection of paintings and sculptures by Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh.

[22] The Cone sisters' items also include Coptic fragments, Middle Eastern silks, eighteenth-century jewelry, nineteenth-century furniture, oriental rugs, African adornment, Japanese prints, Egyptian sculpture, and antique ivory carvings.

Other Matisse works they acquired were the 1917 Woman in a Turban (Lorette), Seated Odalisque, Knee Bent, Ornamental Background (1928), and Interior, Flowers with Parakeets (1924).

[29] The Cone sisters also acquired many of Picasso's works, and among these were 114 prints and drawings from his early years in Barcelona and from his Rose period (1905–1906) in Paris.

[31] The Cone sisters were buried at Baltimore's Druid Ridge Cemetery in an area called Hickory Knoll.

Architect James O. Olney designed the Tennessee marble mausoleum, which is flanked by two Roman-style columns of Vermont granite and has two age-darkened bronze doors in front.