page_title: Ima Hogg
section_title: Restorations
hierarchical_section_title: Ima Hogg / Philanthropist and community leader / Restorations
caption_attribution_description: English: Bayou Bend estate in Houston, Texas.
context_page_description: Ima Hogg, known as "The First Lady of Texas", was an American society leader, philanthropist, patron and collector of the arts, and one of the most respected women in Texas during the 20th century. Hogg was an avid art collector, and owned works by Picasso, Klee, and Matisse, among others. Hogg donated hundreds of pieces of artwork to Houston's Museum of Fine Arts and served on a committee to plan the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. An enthusiastic collector of early American antiques, she also served on a committee tasked with locating historical furniture for the White House. She restored and refurbished several properties, including the Varner plantation and Bayou Bend, which she later donated to Texas arts and historical institutions who maintain the facilities and their collections today. Hogg received numerous awards and honors, including the Louise E. du Pont Crowninshield Award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Santa Rita Award from the University of Texas System, and an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Southwestern University.
context_section_description: Although Hogg spent little time at the Varner plantation after Bayou Bend was constructed, she continued to purchase art and antique furniture on its behalf. In the 1950s, she restored the plantation, and each room was given a different theme from Texas history: colonial times, the Confederacy, Napoleonic times (1818), and the Mexican–American War. One room was dedicated to her father, and contained his desk and chair as well as his collection of walking sticks. She donated the property to the state, and it was dedicated as the Varner–Hogg Plantation State Historical Site in 1958, the 107th anniversary of Jim Hogg's birth.
  As the Varner–Hogg restoration wound to a halt, Hogg refocused her attention on her Houston home, Bayou Bend, which housed some of her personal collection of antiques and artwork. The New York Times described her "superb Early American furniture" collection in 1953, and she had a large collection of Americana and colonial Mexican decorative arts, some of which are still in the house. In the late 1950s she said: "I had been collecting American furniture. I collected, and collected, and collected, until I had so much of it I didn't know what to do with it. I decided to give it to a museum." She collaborated with the original architect John Staub on structural changes that would prepare the home to be a museum. She denuded the home of personal items and items that did not meet her concept; the only piece of non-American furniture in the home was her English dining table, which had too many memories for her to remove it.
  Several residents of River Oaks sued to prevent Bayou Bend becoming a museum, but Hogg prevailed in court. To alleviate the residents' concerns over increased traffic, she asked the city of Houston to build a footbridge over Buffalo Bayou so that visitors could reach the house without having to drive through River Oaks. In the fall of 1965, Hogg moved out of her home, telling the docents that "When you love something enough it's easy to give it up in order to see it go on." The MFAH opened the new museum to the public in 1966 as MFAH's Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens. At its dedication, Charles Montgomery, a senior research fellow at the Henry Francis DuPont Winterthur Museum, called Bayou Bend "the largest, finest collection this side of Winterthur".
  In 1963, Hogg purchased property near Round Top, hoping to move its historic building to Bayou Bend. When that plan proved impractical, she decided to restore it in place and temporarily moved to Round Top. After personally supervising the restoration of the Winedale Inn, a stagecoach inn near Round Top, Hogg donated the property to the University of Texas at Austin. Known as the Winedale Historical Center, it is used primarily as an outdoor museum and music center, and annually hosts Shakespeare at Winedale. In 1969, she restored her parents' house in Quitman; the town renamed it the Ima Hogg Museum in her honor. The museum holds items from the history of Wood County and northeast Texas. She later restored the home of her maternal grandfather and had it moved to the park.
caption: Ima Hogg helped to design Bayou Bend, which is now a museum operated by the Houston's Museum of Fine Arts.
exif: {"Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "Canon PowerShot A590 IS", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "180", "Image YResolution": "180", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image DateTime": "2008:03:31 16:21:12", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image ExifOffset": "196", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "180", "Thumbnail YResolution": "180", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "5108", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6581", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/200", "EXIF FNumber": "4", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "80", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2008:03:31 16:21:12", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2008:03:31 16:21:12", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "3", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "245/32", "EXIF ApertureValue": "4", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "11/4", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, auto mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "29/5", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "3264", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2448", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "Interoperability RelatedImageWidth": "3264", "Interoperability RelatedImageLength": "2448", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "3178", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "43520/3", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "2448000/169", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "2", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard"}