Bayou Bend Turns Fifty

Houston, Texas

:Ima Hogg, daughter of former Texas governor James Hogg, is well-known in collecting circles as the creator of Bayou Bend, the historic house museum in Houston containing one of the premier assemblages of American antebellum decorative arts.

Hogg gave her home and collection to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 1957. To celebrate Bayou Bend's 50th anniversary, the museum is publishing a new book, due out in September, that explores Bayou Bend's past with an eye toward the future.

Certain to engage casual readers and experts alike with its behind-the-scenes account, America's Treasures at Bayou Bend: Celebrating Fifty Years offers a warmly personal introduction to Hogg and her circle while limning the museum's evolution since its founder's death in 1975.

Written by Bayou Bend's longtime curator Michael K. Brown, America's Treasures at Bayou Bend features an introduction by decorative arts scholar Jonathan Fairbanks, who trained Bayou Bend's first class of docents. Bayou Bend's small but outstanding collection of Eighteenth Century portraiture is detailed in entries by MFA Houston curator Emily Ballew Neff.

Beautiful color photography by Miguel Flores-Vianna helps make this highly readable new book a fine companion to American Decorative Arts and Paintings in The Bayou Bend Collection, published in 1998. A thorough catalog of the collection, the latter capped the career of David B. Warren, who arrived at Bayou Bend from Winterthur in 1965 as the museum's first curator and retired as director in 2003.

Warren also wrote Bayou Bend Gardens: A Southern Oasis. Published last year, it illuminates the design and collections of the historic landscape, a magnet for lovers of rare plants and classical sculpture.

Surrounded by 14 acres of formal gardens and woodlands in River Oaks, a posh residential neighborhood developed by the Hoggs in the 1920s, Bayou Bend is five miles from the Museum of Fine Art, Houston's main campus, which houses the 1924 William Ward Watkin building and two Ludwig Mies van der Rohe additions, completed in 1958 and 1974.

Architect John F. Staub designed Bayou Bend in 1927 for Hogg and her brothers. Of pale pink stucco with black ornamental iron porches and balconies, the mansion, which opened to the public in 1966, vaguely recalls the great residences of Charleston and New Orleans.

Increasing Bayou Bend's visibility and ability to attract new audiences has been Bonnie Campbell's mission since succeeding Warren as director in October 2004. Says Campbell, "Even in Houston, people consider Bayou Bend a hidden treasure. Physical location has a lot to do with it. We are literally hidden from view, a problem that we plan to correct with a new visitors and education center."