The Mighty Refined

Although Ima Hogg was one of the more improbably named of America's great collectors, her cultural legacy is as impressive in its quietly well-bred way as that of any Gilded Age benefactor. The daughter of larger-than-life Texas governor James Hogg, who named her after a heroine in a flowery Civil War epic poem, Miss Ima, as she was known, never married and apparently suffered from depression. However, when her comfortable inheritance was boosted by the oil discovered on the family plantation, Miss Ima set out to instill a taste for the arts in her adopted city of Houston, then a roustabout cow town. After she founded the Houston Symphony, she and her brothers built a mansion in the 1920s with the explicit intention of turning it into a museum.

As a child growing up in Houston, I had heard, of course, about Miss Ima (and her apocryphal sister, Ura), and I can remember an early visit to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, when nearly everything on exhibit seemed to have been loaned by her or her brother Will, who had a passion for Frederic Remington. Long before I was of an age to appreciate Miss Ima's tastes, I had moved away.

I think it was at the terraced edge of the Diana Garden at Bayou Bend—her mansion-museum in the heart of River Oaks, the exclusive woodsy neighborhood Will developed—that I realized I am now of the age. With its graceful marble statue of the mythic huntress framed by the spray of multiple fountains and a splash of lilac azaleas, I began to succumb to the orderly, genteel world of the past that she evoked with painstaking, almost fussy attention to detail.

A fervent Colonial Revivalist, she was one of the most avid collectors of Early Americana in the country, regularly bidding at auction against Henry du Pont. Although Texas, she once said, is thought of as "an empire unto itself," she hoped that Bayou Bend would serve as "a bridge to bring us closer to the heart of an American heritage which unites us." Each room is devoted to a different era in American furnishings, and the well-informed docents can tell you in great detail the provenance of each piece, from posset pots and Revere teaspoons to Sargent and Copley portraits. Miss Ima kept copious notes about her acquisitions and her desires—so much so that after her death, museum trustees were able to acquire pieces that she had long had her eye on.

The next day, I drove south to the sleepy family plantation she had turned into a kind of shrine to her father and a museum of antebellum life. In contrast to the formal atmosphere of Bayou Bend, the Varner-Hogg Plantation, now a state park, has a much homier feel. In the main house, pieces from Miss Ima's astonishing collection of antique quilts are draped across bedsteads and rocking chairs, and in the dining hall, the place settings of commemorative Texas-history crockery appear ready to serve a hearty meal. I spent a tranquil afternoon at Varner-Hogg, strolling around its extensive pecan-shaded grounds.