Born: 14 November 1864, United States
Died: 20 September 1929
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following bio was written by Emma Rosen, author of On This Day She Made History: 366 Days With Women Who Shaped the World and This Day In Human Ingenuity & Discovery: 366 Days of Scientific Milestones with Women in the Spotlight, and has been republished with permission.
Claribel Cone significantly contributed to two distinct fields: biology and the patronage of modern French art.
The parents of the Cones were Herman (originally Kahn) and Helen (Guggenheimer) Cone, German-Jewish immigrants. Upon his arrival from Altenstadt, Bavaria, in 1845, Herman immediately anglicized his last name to “Cone.” The family lived in Jonesboro, Tennessee, until 1871, running a successful grocery business. Herman and Helen Cone and their family relocated to Baltimore, Maryland, in 1871. The eldest Cone brothers, Moses and Ceasar, eventually settled in Greensboro, North Carolina, where they founded the Cone Mills Corporation, now a part of the International Textile Group. The success of the textile mills initiated by Moses and Ceasar significantly contributed to the wealth of the Cone family, as the brothers shared their financial prosperity with their siblings.
Claribel Cone graduated from the Women’s Medical College of Baltimore in 1890. She then pursued further studies at Johns Hopkins and the University of Pennsylvania, initially aspiring to become a physician. However, her internship at Philadelphia Blockley Hospital for the Insane shifted her focus toward teaching and research. Consequently, she served as a professor of pathology at the Women’s Medical College of Baltimore for 25 years.
Her venture into the world of art patronage began in Paris in 1903 when she and her sister, Etta, visited Gertrude Stein, who later wrote about them in her essay “Two Women.” Over time, the Cone sisters amassed a remarkable collection of over two hundred works by artists such as Picasso, Matisse, Renoir, Cezanne, Degas, Gauguin, and many others.
In their Baltimore apartments, they amassed one of the US’s most renowned private collections of modern art. This collection now forms a significant part of the Baltimore Museum of Art. As of 2002, the value of their collection was estimated to be close to a billion US dollars.