Theodate's formal education finished, her parents decided on the grand tour. On October 20, 1888, the Popes set off on their first great European adventure. They were joined by Nora Shephard, Ada Pope's older, widowed sister, and Harris Whittemore, the handsome son of Alfred Pope's business associate, then working in the Cleveland office. The travel plan was loose. Since Mr. Pope wanted to follow warm weather through the fall and winter, the party, after a glorious November in Paris, traveled via a circuitous route through France, Spain, southern France, and Italy, returning to London and Paris for the spring. June would be occupied by a side trip through England up into Scotland. July found them in Brussels, the Hague, Amsterdam, Germany, and Switzerland. After another stay in Paris and London, they sailed for home on September 4th.

Outside of England and France they traveled with a courier whose function was to interpret for them and make all hotel, train, and carriage arrangements. In England it was their butler, Earnest Bohlen, who took care of their baggage. This left them free to cram their days with excursions to great country houses and the other points of interest that Mrs. Pope and her sister found in poring over guidebooks. There were relaxed days, too, in which Theodate pursued a reading program of novels, history, and issues of the Nation.

It was Theodate's idea to include Harris who was three years older than she and an avowed suitor of hers. He had declared that he loved her several months earlier "on a plain Sunday night after [they] had been wicked enough to play a game of checkers in the smoking room" of the Popes' house.¹ In the first month in Paris, the Pope party lingered at the Louvre, Notre-Dame, the Panthéon, and Sacré-Coeur, which was in the throes of construction. Theodate and Harris had ample opportunity to leave the others, Harris doing his best to take her to romantic settings where her feelings for him might deepen. Off they went to St Cloud and, later, up the Seine to the zoological gardens. At the Louvre he pointed out some paintings by Hals, Rembrandt, and Rubens which she had failed to notice. He took her to lunch at the Café Marguery for its famed fillet of sole with shrimp. The Café Marguery became a favorite restaurant, Mrs. Pope attempting to wheedle the sauce recipes from M. Marguery.

Nevertheless, by the end of November Theodate had begun to take an active dislike to Harris. By mid-February, a dejected Harris left the group in Rome to proceed alone to Florence. Theodate wasn't ready to be "settled and done for," as she regarded marriage. She was afraid that Harris might hamper her future writing or whatever other occupation she might choose. Furthermore, even if Harris was a perfect choice from her father's point of view, he did not fit her conception of an ideal man, and she gradually realized that she did not love him. On this point her father was very understanding, and, as the trip progressed, the two formed a close bond. But her rejection of Harris was not at all easy, especially when he showed up again in Paris early in the spring to renew his suit. Agonizing over her decision produced a nervous crisis for which a French doctor prescribed a tonic and several mild doses of electricity - not an unusual prescription for depression at the time. If she was not going to marry Harris, then she absolutely must choose a vocation. As for Harris, Mr. Pope's fatherly relationship with him was never at stake, and later Theodate would prize the friendship and guidance of her former suitor.

Mr. Pope's greatest pleasure was going to galleries and exhibitions with an eye to acquiring some paintings for the house he had recently built. His young brother-in-law, Ned Brooks, who had settled in Paris with his family to study landscape painting, helped advise him as to dealers and painters. John Kavanaugh, who had painted portraits of the Pope family and had given lessons to Theodate, was also there working on a large salon piece as well as painting a portrait from a photo of Harris Whittemore's deceased, younger brother Howard. Theodate, and Harris during their first month in Paris, accompanied Mr. Pope, making judgments as to the relative merits of the works viewed. For Theodate, following her father's interest in painting was a major objective on the tour; while Harris knew that his father would want paintings for the gabled mansion McKim, Mead & White were building for him in Naugatuck.

Mr. Pope's taste, supported by Theodate, gravitated towards the popular Barbizon painters and their Dutch followers. During the course of the trip he bought several works by Anton Mauve (1838-1888), a cousin of Vincent Van Gogh and a painter of gentle landscape and genre scenes. Like Millet he painted peasants, softening their daily tasks by a diffused light.²

In mid-November they viewed the Secrétan collection which was to be auctioned at the beginning of July - Monsieur Secrétan, a copper magnate, was facing bankruptcy. With its Dutch and Flemish old masters and French nineteenth-century works by established artists, the collection was typical of contemporary taste in collecting. Theodate was impressed with the high quality of the paintings and looked carefully at Millet's Angelus, for which the French Ministry of Fine Arts would bid an amazingly high $111,000.³ The Havemeyers bought paintings at the Secrétan auction, but Mr. Pope did not return from England to attend the sale. He was not ready to pay high prices.

Alfred Pope's taste for the Barbizon painters began to extend to their successors; Theodate lagged not far behind. With Ned Brooks they visited the Durand-Ruel gallery's collection of Impressionists on November 9th. Mr. Pope had already put down a deposit for two paintings by Monet at Boussod, Valadon and Co.⁴ By the early summer Theodate could record of the Impressionists:

Now the Impressionists are interesting, but I doubt if any of the work they are now doing will last. It has its place in the history of art because they came in just the right time. They are showing us that nature should be studied out of doors and that no landscape should be painted in the studio. The[y] are bringing us a freshness that Corot Rousseau Daubigny and other artists of that school never dreamed of. Never the less they are going too far in the opposite direction but it takes some men to go beyond the line in order to bring others to it or as Papa says the impressionists are shouting in order to be heard.⁵

Her enthusiasm for Monet matched that of her father. At an exhibition of paintings by Monet teamed with sculpture by Rodin at the Galerie Georges Petit, she singled out what she thought was the best Monet, a picture of frost-covered haystacks glistening in the early morning sun.⁶ She thought this picture, called Gelée blanche or Haystacks, White Frost, the best Monet she had yet seen, and even though her father did not particularly fancy it, she urged him to buy it. This he did on their last morning in Paris when he also made his final decision to buy Monet's Rochers à Belle-Ile.⁷

Alfred Pope's admiration for Degas and Whistler also stems from this first European tour. Theo Van Gogh, who worked for Boussod, Valadon took him and Theodate to a private house to see some of Degas's paintings.⁸ In London they went to Whistler's dealer, Walter Dowdeswell, who showed them a portrait of a woman which Theodate thought "remarkably fine" and her father found it "quite a little like the work of Velasquez."⁹ Several days later they saw the master himself at an exhibition of Monet's work.

They did not lose interest in the more established painters. The Popes were in Paris for the Salon, which opened on May first at the palace of the Champs-Elysées, and for the Exposition Centennale des Beaux-Arts, part of the World's Fair, which opened a week later at the palace of the Champ-de-Mars. At the Salon, Alfred Pope picked out three paintings that he thought of buying. Later in August he purchased two of these, a painting by Alexandre Lunois and a picture of a young girl at her toilette by Etienne Tournès.¹⁰ They spent much of May 9th, from half past ten in the morning until five in the afternoon at the Exposition where Theodate singled out two portraits of girls by Sir Hubert von Herkomer (1849-1914). She makes no mention of the other British entries that included paintings by Whistler and the Pre-Raphaelites, drawings by Kate Greenaway and Walter Crane, and architectural renderings of new houses on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. Alfred Pope was attracted by the works of Eugene Carrière (1849-1906). Theodate much preferred the two paintings by Carrière that her father had acquired sometime before the trip to the painter's later works shown at the Exposition. Nevertheless, two days later he bought his third Carrière, Child at Table from Boussod, Valadon.¹¹

When the Popes were in London, with only a few days left before sailing, Mr. Pope considered buying one more painting. The Popes had acquired paintings, sculpture, antique furniture, and objets d'art with which to enrich their lives visually; the ladies also had bought dresses from stylish Parisian couturiers. In London Mr. Pope had already bought prints by Whistler and Charles Meryon and a Morris and Co. tapestry based on Walter Crane's Goose Girl.¹² Nonetheless, since he and Theodate liked the works of the Dutch painter Matthew Maris, they paid a call to his small, disorderly studio in North London on their last afternoon. He served them tea and fruit and regaled them with witty stories for an hour and a quarter, but nothing was bought as they decided that they preferred his early period. Indeed, Theodate thought his latest paintings gray, indistinct, and quite weird.¹³

Although Theodate was developing a critical eye, it was not painting but architecture with "picturesque" characteristics that really moved her. She describes an afternoon's train ride from Biarritz towards the Escorial:

Our afternoon's ride from Biarritz on the way to the Escorial was through the most picturesque country. Little stone houses, mellow with age that looked as if they had grown up from the soil so well did they harmonize in color with it, and the old tile roofs were in autumn shades. The first part of the afternoon we rode in the valleys and the sun was warm; the latter part of our ride was very high and we went through tunnel after tunnel, in all over thirty. The sky was a beautiful blue all day and after sunset the afterglow was with us quite a while alternately silueting [sic.] and lighting villages as we came towards and left them.¹⁴

She thought Oxford "a perfect place" and singled out Magdalen College with its deer park and cloisters. She admired especially the college quadrangles and the use of a sandstone which crumbled with age giving the buildings a "picturesque look."¹⁵ When Theodate later planned Avon, she conceived of two adjacent quadrangles as are found in some of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. Avon was built of local sandstone; and the use of old English methods of construction helped produce such intentional effects of instant age as sagging roofs. She loved England's Richmond Green, at that time surrounded by old houses and crisscrossed by footpaths. The concept of the village green would also be part of her plan for Avon.

In general she had an affinity for buildings that were Gothic or could be found picturesque as opposed to those that were classical or classicizing. The way had been paved by the books to which she had been introduced. While at Miss Porter's, Mary Hillard had suggested that she read Edmund Burke's famous essay, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas on the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), which had helped to formulate Romantic aesthetic theory. Her father had given her Walter Hamilton's, The Aesthetic Movement in England, which focused her appreciation on a contemporary offshoot of the Romantic movement.¹⁶

Although the Popes spent several days visiting the 1889 World's Fair at the Champ-de-Mars, Theodate does not mention the collection of native villages, the Indian Palace, or the pavilions erected by the South American countries with their surfeit of domes and heavy ornate decoration - a provincial variant of the French Second Empire style.¹⁷ And when it came to the Eiffel Tower, the star attraction of Paris for its modern design, Theodate mounted only as far as the first platform, not liking the "fiendish elevator."¹⁸ On a visit to Versailles the Popes found that the French president and a multitude of people had pre-empted the palace to celebrate the centennial of the Revolution. This did not prevent them from visiting the Petit Trianon, which Theodate thought very pretty. But it was the hameau, Marie Antoinette's pastoral retreat with its little dairy and mills, that enchanted her. She photographed the simulated hamlet with the expensive camera her father had given her.

Being rather prudish at this time, Theodate did not develop much affection for the French or for Paris in particular. Paris, she felt, was an immoral city, the French wicked and vulgar (for Theodate these terms were synonymous at the time). In her diary she assailed Paris as "the greatest blot on the face of the earth" and added, "it's a paste and the superficial take it for a diamond."¹⁹ England she loved without reservation. No wonder, then, that she would later look to England for architectural inspiration. Likewise her love of Farmington would be a factor in her allegiance to New England traditional styles as opposed to the heavy structures mushrooming in Cleveland and other industrial cities as an expression of the power of newly rich civic leaders.

Everyday objects, rather than objects showing great skill, also fascinated Theodate. For example, she describes in detail the making of pottery at a factory on the outskirts of Seville.²⁰ In Cadiz she wondered at a primitive musical instrument with an earthenware body covered by a taut skin - a thin piece of bamboo, thrust through this skin producing musical sounds when rubbed. And at the National Museum in Naples, the ancient Roman weights in the shape of what was to be weighed, medical instruments, and cooking utensils interested her as much as the frescoes among the treasures excavated from Pompeii.

The idea that crafts could be taught to benefit the lives of workers especially appealed to her. She was concerned with the plight of the poor, especially in juxtaposition to her position of privilege. She noted in her diary, for example, that while she and her parents were in a Roman palace attending the concert of a famous violinist, several hundred unemployed workers were rioting in the Piazza di Spagna, smashing windows and calling for bread.²¹ Feelings of guilt at being so favored by fortune fostered her humanitarian impulses.

Two visits in 1889 with her father to the People's Palace on Mile End Road in East London gave her not only inspiration for the charitable endeavors she would undertake eight years later, but also suggested the idea of crafts as a teaching aid - a major premise of her educational policy at Avon.²² A utopian center in one of London's poorest neighborhoods, the People's Palace sought to mold and uplift the character of the working classes through the teaching of crafts, physical activities, lectures, concerts, and a library. It was modeled on a fictive "Palace of Delight" created by Sir Walter Besant in his novel, All Sorts and Conditions of Men, published in 1882. Theodate had been very excited by this book, which she had read just prior to the tour. She had recommended it to Agnes Hamilton, a former schoolmate at Miss Porter's, as the book to read on the question of charity.²³ Theodate was deeply moved by its unselfish and wealthy protagonist, the beautiful blonde Angela, who concealed her identity and shed her carefree existence to live among the poor as a seamstress. And could not Theodate identify with a heroine called Angela, who was rich and who, above all else, wanted to help the poor? In the novel, Angela began a program of good works, starting a co-operative dressmakers association. She then devised an experiment to bring music, art, books - the pleasures of the leisure class - to the poor in East London. Her "Palace of Delight" included three large halls: one for dancing, which doubled on wet days as a children's playroom; a second for exhibitions; and a third for a library. In addition there was a theatre with an organ for the plays and music the workers were to create themselves, as well as classrooms for crafts and lectures. The physical and social well-being of the workers was not neglected. There were to be tennis and racquet courts, billiard rooms, a card-room, a smoking room, and a tea room for the women.

This book was only one of many responses to the hardships caused by the Industrial Revolution that had brought migrations of workers to a squalid life and wretched working conditions in the cities. But many of the very men who owned the new factories were the fathers or grandfathers of people who, like Angela or Theodate Pope, developed a strong social conscience. The latter were brought up on George Eliot's cautionary tales, which, with such memorable craftsmen as Adam Bede the carpenter and Silas Marner the weaver, contributed to the nostalgia for a simpler pre-industrial life in the country villages. Also, Victorian London had had more than a quarter of a century to absorb John Ruskin's theories about lifting the working classes out of their abject material and spiritual conditions through training in crafts.

In 1882, the same year in which All Sorts and Conditions of Men appeared, William Morris published a group of his lectures as Hopes and Fears for Art. Following Ruskin, he too idealized the medieval craftsman and called for modern artisans to free themselves from slavery to machines by returning to pre-industrial production methods. The embellishment of an object, the creation of beauty through handwork, would ennoble the soul of the craftsman. Two years later, in 1884, five young architects founded the Art Workers Guild to establish a fellowship of the arts and to unite all classes of art workmen. The Guild's ambition to restore certain handicrafts, such as lace making, weaving, bookbinding, and woodworking that were seen as being in danger of extinction, was taken up by the British Home Arts and Industries Association founded in the same year. Upper-middle-class women took a prominent role in this association in both establishing classes all over rural Britain and in organizing the means of selling the products. The practical implementation of these ideals of restoring crafts and at the same time aiding the poor spiritually and financially was also taken up by the settlement houses. 1884 saw the first settlement house, Toynbee Hall, established in Whitechapel, London. Here the privileged could not only put to work the ideas of Ruskin and Morris in teaching crafts and the concept of the brotherhood of humanity to the poor, but just as important, they could live with them. American offshoots of Toynbee Hall would attract Theodate and her close friends from Miss Porter's, the Hamilton cousins.

When Queen Victoria presided over the opening of the People's Palace in 1887, it was thought that the learning of crafts could serve as an educational tool by training habits of method. Temporary buildings housed a craft exhibition which included shipbuilding, furniture making, glass blowing, hand loom weaving, brewing, tanning, and even jam making. The Queen's Hall for lectures and concerts had been completed and could hold 2,500 people. The hall took its name from twenty-two caryatid queens which supported balconies on the first level, and, flanked by pairs of Corinthian columns, reached towards the coffered barrel vault on the second.²⁴ This ornate, eclectic style was not exactly what Besant's heroine had in mind when she stipulated that "everything was to be constructed for use and not for show" in her palace.²⁵ An octagonal library, which was important as one of the few sources of books for the poor in East London, an art gallery with a panorama, and a botanical winter garden for palms, ferns, and bananas were still in the planning stage but did get built. The exterior was originally planned to be rotund with minarets, tall enough to tower above the neighborhood "to invite men to learn and to rise."

By its very appearance, the building will suggest Association and strength born of common life and common interests; Aspiration, without which common life must lose half its value, and that restful Pleasure which has to be added to the lives of workers, to make either association or aspiration possible.²⁶

What Theodate saw on her initial visit in April in 1889 was the round library and the Queen's Hall. Below the hall she inspected classes which included a carpentry shop, an electrical shop, a needlework room and a large art studio for wood carving, drawing, and modelling. A swimming pool of glazed white brick with over one hundred changing rooms was in a separate building. On her second visit she discovered a photography studio and attended a gymnastic event performed by some sixty girls. Contrary to her expectations the performers and audience could not be classified as poor but came from "comfortable homes." Less than ten years later the People's Palace had shed its utopian vision to become a technical school. It merged with the Bromley and Bow Institute to form East London College and today, known as Queen Mary's College, is part of London University. In this transformation the recreational halls were torn down. Nevertheless, Theodate's experience had fired her imagination, and she would hold fast to the idea of crafts both as useful skills to be taught and as a means for learning in itself.

This first European tour had broadened Theodate's artistic ideas considerably. She had received excellent guidance in the connoisseurship of modern French painting. Gradually as she had accompanied her father to exhibitions and galleries, her appreciation for the Impressionists her father prized increased, and she began to make not only competent judgments of their works but also of the Barbizon painters who had preceded them. She had also looked carefully at what the museums had to offer and at various architectural monuments. As she honed her visual skills she came to prefer painting that seemed spontaneous to that which looked carefully calculated - the broad brush stroke, that could convey light and action, to a polished surface. In architecture she was drawn to the vernacular idiom, which was additive and asymmetrical and based on native traditional building procedures, as opposed to the classicizing Beaux-Arts style.

The tour also gave her a year's respite in attempting to decide what to do with her life. Her father proposed architecture among other possibilities.²⁷ She had been drawing elevations and plans of houses since she was about ten years old.²⁸ Not long after her father's suggestion, she made a rendering of a column at Paestum (Fig.5).²⁹ But having decided against college, her only recourse was to become an apprentice in an architect's office, and this she thought "rather mannish" - an unwomanly woman [being] the worst of all the unlovely things in the world."³⁰ Still, she did not give up the idea.

Her greatest dream, which she had cherished since her school days and to which she obsessively returned on this trip, was to have a farmhouse which she would design herself. Here she could invite her closest friends and take in poor children. She did not discuss the charitable part of her plan with her father who was inclined to indulge her wish, thinking of the benefit of fresh eggs, butter, and milk for the family. He agreed providing that she keep the house plain and inexpensive. Her idea was that she should run the farm, sell the dairy products, and keep the accounts preferably with the aid of a couple. She spent days drawing plans and putting them on architect's paper - creating a house which could also accommodate her parents. This was the germ, the beginning of Hill-Stead.

She wanted the house to look like a New England farmhouse, but she gathered ideas from what she saw.³¹ In Chelsea she drew a quick sketch of a window in a house near that of George Eliot.³² Foraging for motifs - a window, a fireplace - of which she made sketches in a small notebook, or whatever blank surface she had, was one of her working methods. A few such sketches made years later in England while she was designing Avon Old Farms still exist.³³

Ideas for her farm could come from unexpected places. At the Château de Fontainebleau she was struck by a "beautiful room in brown" and wrote in her diary, "...how fine a living room would be done in that color; dark oak, brown carpet and paper with ecru colors in it. Then have tulips on the window ledges. Wouldn't that be an ideal room?"³⁴ Later in the interiors of the houses she designed for herself and her parents, the O'Rourkery and Hill-Stead, she would favor painted paneling simulating grained wood. The farm took on such a palpable presence in her mind that she even bought romaine and chicory seeds for the vegetable garden and prints for the walls.

She realized, though, that the farm, even if she did design the farmhouse, was not something she would achieve by her own efforts. Her father would be paying for it. She still wanted something with which to occupy herself. About the necessity of taking up some beneficial action she wrote in her diary just before returning home:

But I can't just sit and hope. Hope is very lovely in its place but if I do not also act I shall wake some morning to find myself middle aged and sorrowing because I have not tried to make the world I touch a little better.³⁵

Theodate had been introduced to major artistic, social, and educational ideas. It remained for her to carry them through, which she did in her own good time.