By Edward J. Sozanski
Inquirer Art Critic
American art museums have typically sprouted from private collections, yet, as museums expand their identities,


they inevitably become less personal and more institutional.

By contrast, house museums preserve and even celebrate the personalities of their founders. When you visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston or the Barnes Foundation in Merion, for instance, you experience a synergistic package. You not only get a particular collection, sometimes housed in a building created for it, you get the collector as well.

The founder’s spirit is particularly strong at Hillwood Museum & Gardens in Washington, which houses the collections of the late Marjorie Merriweather Post. Post, who died in 1973 at 86, was a wealthy heiress who developed passions for French and imperial Russian decorative arts.

For a Philadelphian discovering Hillwood, comparisons with the Barnes Foundation spring readily to mind. Both present distinctive collections in a garden-arboretum setting. Both express the personalities of their founders as well as their aesthetic taste. This is perhaps more obvious at Hillwood, because at the Barnes the quality of the art, and the unique character of the collection, are more likely to command public attention.

There’s a parallel, too, in the way the institutions have had to relate to their neighbors. As we will see, Hillwood has been far more successful in accommodating itself to operating in a quiet, secluded residential environment.

Beginning in the 1920s with 18th-century French furniture, Post collected assiduously in her chosen fields for half a century. She developed Hillwood, a 25-acre estate that she bought in 1955, as a combination residence and museum that would show off her acquisitions to maximum advantage.

You might not have heard of Hillwood, because it’s not a mass-market museum. The collection specializes in specific aspects of European decorative arts, such as Sèvres and Russian imperial porcelain, French furniture, and Russian icons and liturgical objects and textiles. Visitors unfamiliar with those subjects might find the house a bit of a challenge, despite the exceptional “glitter” content of items such as jeweled Fabergé Easter eggs and the diamond crown worn by Empress Alexandra, wife of the last czar.

For antiques lovers, however, the collection is spectacular, brimming with magnificent samples of porcelain dinnerware, elaborate marquetry and precious bibelots. There are paintings as well, but these tend to supplement the principal themes expressed through the objects – for instance, a majestic full-length portrait of Catherine the Great that hangs in the entrance hall.

Hillwood lies several miles north of Dupont Circle, east of Connecticut Avenue in a leafy suburban neighborhood bordering Rock Creek Park. Unlike the Barnes Foundation, which antagonized its neighbors, Hillwood went out of its way to negotiate a covenant, periodically reviewed, that establishes ground rules for its operation. Reservations are required to visit, and parking is on site. (You can take the Metro to the Van Ness station and walk from Connecticut Avenue, which takes about 20 minutes.)

Roughly half of the 25-acre property is devoted to formal gardens that surround the house. There’s a small French parterre, a rose garden, a “friendship walk,” a cutting garden that supplies flowers for the house, and a stunning Japanese garden that runs down a hillside. Orchids, Post’s favorite flower, fill a small greenhouse.

The estate also includes a visitor center, cafe (the borscht is outstanding), and several other outbuildings used for administration, public programs and special exhibitions.

As one tours the house, even Post’s bedroom, dressing room and the spacious kitchen, her presence is palpable. As David Johnson, deputy director for collections and chief curator, observed, “We embody the Marjorie Merriweather Post tradition of hospitality; it’s almost as if she were still here.”

Post enjoyed entertaining and showing visitors her collection, which has grown to about 17,000 items. The museum staff under director Frederick J. Fisher tries to maintain that atmosphere for the approximately 45,000 visitors who come every year.

Angie Dodson, deputy director for interpretation, believes the museum can increase its visitorship to 100,000 a year “without disturbing the green setting and while maintaining the gracious hospitality” for which Post was known.

Hillwood prompted me to remember that, although not usually publicized as such, the Barnes Foundation is in a classic house museum, even though the gallery building was not a residence. As at Hillwood, the collector, the collection and the site are all bound inextricably together. One wouldn’t think of moving the Hillwood collection elsewhere – that would destroy its ambience.

Yet the Barnes trustees, with the connivance of the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Lenfest and Annenberg Foundations, are proceeding to do just that. In what strikes me as a tragic and hubristic act of cultural strip-mining, they’re planning to separate the museum from its house, and the historical and cultural associations that go with it, and move it to Center City.

Post wasn’t nearly as intellectually adventurous or as inspired a collector as Albert Barnes was, yet the Hillwood administration recognizes that her spirit and personality are intrinsic to what makes their museum special. The Barnes trustees, by contrast, have long acted as if their founder were an embarrassment who needs to be written out of their visitor scenario.

Hillwood believes it can more than double its annual attendance, perhaps even triple it, without compromising its facility or its covenant with its neighbors. The Barnes trustees, who operate in a similar situation, have convinced themselves to the contrary. Posterity will determine which position was dead wrong.

Art | A Personal Museum

Hillwood, 4155 Linnean Ave. N.W., Washington, is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, and on select evenings and Sundays. Closed in January and on national holidays. Reservations are required, and can be made by calling 202-686-5807 or 1-877-445-5966. Reservations also can be booked through the Web site, www.hillwoodmuseum.org. The general information number is 202-686-8500. For cafe reservations, call 202-243-3920. Admission is $12 general, $10 for visitors 65 and older,

$7 for full-time college students, and $5 for visitors 6 through 18.