QUEEN OF PHILANTHROPY
Ima Hogg’s contributions set the tone that still inspires patronage today
The elegant Miss Ima Hogg loved fanciful hats. But the legendary philanthropist with the burdensome name is the eternal Queen Mum of Texas arts for much better reasons.
Through her efforts, example and financial support during much of the 20th century, she set a tone for cultural philanthropy that still inspires patronage today.
Miss Ima, as she was affectionately known, was in her early 30s when she launched the Houston Symphony, determined to bring home the joys of classical music that became her spiritual center during formative, cosmopolitan years in New York and Germany.
The stresses of World War I and her struggle with depression might have derailed another budding patron, but during her several years away for treatment, oil gushed from a Brazoria County property the four Hogg siblings inherited. While her brothers managed the family business and developed the vast tract of real estate west of downtown thatwould become River Oaks, Miss Ima poured her business acumen into civic projects, mobilizing a powerful group of friends to join her.
The symphony was her first baby. But as Will Hogg, Miss Ima’s older brother and confidante, helped to build the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, she became one of its first major patrons. She donated important collections of works on paper, Indian artifacts, paintings and sculpture by Frederic Remington during the early decades, adding significant holdings of modern art and bringing firm footing to the decorative arts department when she donated her Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens to the museum in 1957. She had furnished Bayou Bend from the beginning as a treasure trove of Americana, developing her connoisseur’s eye for American antiques well before the rest of theworld appreciated their value.
Outside of the arts realm, Miss Ima established the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health with proceeds from Will’s estate. She also founded the Houston Child Guidance Center, the pioneering alternative for mental health services that would become DePelchin Children’s Center; and she served on the Houston Board of Education. She took on historic building preservation and the legacy of Texas-made furniture in her 80s, rescuing pioneer-era buildings in the settlement of Winedale, near Round Top, that she donated to the University of Texas.
Schooled early in public service, law and politics, Miss Ima was born in Mineola in1882. James “Big Jim” and Sallie Stinson Hogg named their second child and only daughter for the heroine of a poem by Big Jim’s brother, who had recently died. David B. Warren, Bayou Bend’s founding director emeritus, notes in his 2016 biography, “Ima Hogg,” that shewas as lovely as her namesake, with vivid blue eyes and a “peaches-and-cream” complexion. She would not, however, know the same depths of romantic love.
Eight years old when her father was elected governor and 13 when her mother died of tuberculosis, Miss Ima would spend her teens and early 20s as a defacto first lady of Texas and a surrogate mother to her younger brothers, Mike and Tom.
Properly schooled, genteel and popular, she balanced those obligations with a busy social life, frequent travels and a perpetually full dance card, but rejected marriage proposals. She had a typically poised and witty response to indelicate questions about staying single. “I am fatally attracted to handsome men, and I know if I had married, I would’ve picked a handsome husband who was worthless,” she said.
She aspired to be a concert pianist, studying for several years in New York and Germany with early 20th century luminaries before familial love won out as Mike and Will built the siblings’ first true homes. (They had lived most of their lives in apartments and hotel suites.)
Miss Ima was widely celebrated, like a genteel rock star, during her final decades. She outlived her brothers, dying at 93 in a London hospital, of heart failure, leaving a vibrant legacy that still beats strongly today.