Cooper Hewitt says...
Mrs. Mary Bryant Brandegee (née Pratt) was a descendant of the prominent Weld family of Massachusetts. She and her first husband, Congressman Charles F. Sprague, owned a large estate in Brookline, Massachusetts, where later in life she would avidly breed and raise pedigreed poodles. The manor included an Italian garden that would prove influential among American designers during the early decades of the 20th century. It was among the first realized projects by the soon-to-be prominent landscape architect Charles A. Platt, who was hired after the family clashed with and dismissed the Olmsted Brothers from the project. Charles died in 1902 while Mary and their two daughters were traveling in Egypt and, a few years later, she married a former friend of her deceased husband, Edward D. Brandegee, a manufacturer of men's clothing. In 1938, the museum acquired from the again-widowed Mrs. Brandegee an enormous and important collection of mostly Italian drawings that she had bought in 1904 from Giovanni Piancastelli, the director of the Borghese Gallery in Rome. The Hewitt sisters had also purchased, in 1901, a large group of drawings from Piancastelli, and Brandegee’s contribution served to largely reunite the extraordinary collection.
