The Hoppin family descended from early New England settlers who established themselves in Providence, Rhode Island, during the colonial era. By the nineteenth century they had risen into the professional and political elite of the state. The family produced jurists, legislators, and clergymen, culminating in William Warner Hoppin (1807–1890), who served as Governor of Rhode Island from 1854 to 1857 and was an active supporter of the Union cause during the Civil War. The Hoppins exemplified the cultivated Yankee patriciate—classically educated, civic-minded, and imbued with a sense of public service.

The governor’s descendants combined political influence with artistic and social distinction. His son William Warner Hoppin Jr. (1839–1880) married Catherine Beekman (1841–1923), uniting the family with the old Dutch Beekman line of New York, from which Beekman Street and Beekman Place derive their names. Their son Bayard Cushing Hoppin (1885–1956), Yale Class of 1907 and a veteran of the First World War, bridged the patrician world of the Gilded Age with the modern American business class as a New York stockbroker and philanthropist. Through his marriage to Helen Lispenard Alexandre (1889–1953), the Hoppins became linked to the Alexandre family of international industrialists and art patrons, creating one of the many intricate genealogical intersections that characterize the social tapestry of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.