FROM MEDICI TO BOURBON - Newport Mansions

Having given evidence, in the final renovations to his city residence, of a taste
for soundly grounded period style rooms, Cornelius Vanderbilt II was perhaps seen by
Allard as receptive to the acquisition of a true period room for his, and R.M. Hunt’s,
final project, the 1893-1895 erection of a neo-Renaissance Genoese palazzo-inspired
summer villa in Newport known as ‘The Breakers’ (Fig. 17.). Allard had charge
again of the reception rooms, which in a conscious attempt to re-establish the
seniority, in all matters, of Cornelius as head of the House of Vanderbilt, endowed the
structure with civic-scaled Third Republic French interiors reminiscent of the Paris
Opera and Hôtel de Ville. A few pieces were acquired on a Renaissance or Italian
theme such as a circa 1530 Burgundian chimneypiece formerly in the Frédéric Spitzer
collection 157 and a pair of roman Baroque armchairs with Borghese-Barberini arms
and a circa 1780 Valadier and Asprucci console (Fig. 18.) from the Paolo Borghese
sale in Paris. 158 Overall the furnishings were made by the firm’s Paris workshops
after Renaissance models illustrated in Havard, 159 a novelty being however that
several suites were platinum rather than gold-leafed, surpassing Alva’s gilt rather than
silver seat furniture.
In this heady atmosphere, Jules Allard proposed a complete Louis XVI period
room (Fig. 19.) from his stock that was, as recorded by the family, commissioned by
Marie Antoinette as a gift to her goddaughter Mademoiselle de St. Aulaire. 160 This
157 Acquired with its pendant at the Spitzer sale by the Paris antiquities dealer Heilbronner and sold via
Allard to the Vanderbilts; the pendant was sold by Allard to W.W. Astor for the hall of Cliveden in
1895.
158 Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 2-3 July, 1891.
159 Henry Havard, Dictionaire de l’ameublement, E. Rouveyre et G. Blond, Paris, 1884, p. 635, fig.
439. A Renaissance ‘chaire à vertugadin, à la gênoise, XVIIe siècle’ engraved by Goutzwiller.
160 Archives of the Preservation Society of Newport County, handwritten note (without date) in the
hand of Countess Laszlo Széchényi.
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