I have always loved museums.
This is, as with so many things, the fault of my parents. They started Exposing Me To Culture at an early age, with trips to museums, historic sites, concerts, theater, and the childhood homes of the famous pretty much from the time I was toilet trained. This sometimes resulted in disaster — Mum just about died when I charged the stage screaming “I’ll SAVE YOU ALADDIN!” during a children’s theater production — but overall their efforts succeeded. I hit at least one museum every time I’m in New York (next up: The Museum of Sex, at least if my friend Bella has any say), my week in Italy was devoted almost entirely to the great museums of Florence, and of course I docent at Wistariahurst on weekends.
And then there was my great discovery of the noble, the honorable, the utterly unbelievable Jean Louis de Pouffe, which took place in the Arms & Armory galleries at the Met and shaped my life in some very unexpected ways...but that is neither here nor there.
Many of these museums, like Wistariahurst, were originally either occupied, owned, or endowed by the rich and famous. One of the very earliest I remember, the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, was the result of reactionary industrialist Henry Ford’s obsession with preserving America’s past, and it’s scarcely alone. The Met, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Old Sturbridge Village, Historic Deerfield, the Shelburne Museum, the House of the Seven Gables, the museums at Smith and Mount Holyoke and Amherst, Nook Farm and the Wadsworth Atheneum...all of these owe their existence, or at least a good chunk of their collections, to people with unusual wealth, prominence, or sometimes both.
It’s no secret as to why we’d want to preserve the legacy of the famous; it’s so easy to forget that Calvin Coolidge spent his post-Presidential time in a modest duplex on Massasoit Street in Northampton, or that WEB Dubois was born and raised in Great Barrington, that’s it a good thing we have historical markers to remind us. It’s also easy to see why the rich would end up donating their art collections to the public; you can’t take it with you, after all, plus it’s a nice tax write off AND a way to soften your public image for future generations. I mean, seriously — how many today remember that Henry Clay Frick was one of the most brutal industrialists of his day rather than an art collector? Or that Henry Francis DuPont’s family fortune originated in a gunpowder factory?
For all that, most museums endowed or established by the wealthy are simply museums. Yes, they’re full of great art or fascinating artifacts, but the average visitor isn’t so overwhelmed by gold leaf or rare stones or precious metals or luxurious ornamentation that ze’s tempted to grab the nearest pitchfork and head for the barricades….
And then there are the ones I’m going to discuss below the fold.
Tonight I bring you not Books So Bad They’re Good, but a quartet of Museums of Wretched Excess. By this I mean that the decor, collections, or backstory of these museums are so over the top that they are enough to make one of the non-telegenic Waltons scream “A la lanterne les aristos!” and start dancingthe Carmagnole while a choir of specially chosen opera singers chants “Ca ira!” on continuous loop. Even the noble, the honorable, the utterly unbelievable legend that is Jean Louis de Pouffe would likely have an aneurysm at some of these puppies, each and every one of which I have personally visited:
The Frick Collection, New York City — Stan Lee, the eminence gris of Marvel Comics, likes to say that he came up with the idea for Avengers Mansion after walking past the old Frick house on Fifth Avenue. The Avengers needed a headquarters, see, and where better than a huge, luxurious, all but empty place belonging to their filthy rich patron/member Tony Stark?
Whether this story is 100% accurate or not, it’s easy to see why the home of robber baron and labor smasher extraordinaire Henry Clay Frick would make a great home for a motley band of superheroes, their equipment, and their butler. It’s got a prime location, many bedrooms, a surprisingly big yard, room for extra team members and friends to bunk when they’re in Manhattan, even a palm court inside the house for meditation, contemplation, and polishing one’s vibranium or fletching the occasional arrow. The mansion has absolutely everything….
Except that Tony Stark, unlike Henry Clay Frick, doesn’t decorate his house with a collection of Old Masters, Italian Primitives, and whole French Rococo rooms fit for Marie Antoinette to inhabit as she daintily nibbles on brioche and contemplates yet more ways to stick it to Cardinal Rohan.
You think I exaggerate? Ha! The Frick, which looks impressive but not ridiculous from the exterior includes the following confections:
- An entire room dedicated to the works of Piero della Francesca.
- The aforesaid palm court, complete with palm trees and a big fountain, smack in the middle of the first floor.
- A grand salon graced with works by Constable, Rembrandt, Hals, and a whole bunch of other well known people, plus more floor space than the entire footprint of the Last Homely Shack East of the Manhan. This was built after Frick’s death specifically to hold his finest works, but still.
- An entire room designed and decorated with “wallpaper” that’s actually oil paintings by Fragonard...and if that isn’t fit enough for the reincarnated French aristocracy among us, there’s a SECOND room that is similarly graced with the works of Boucher.
- A collection of rare ceramics that takes up much of the corridor facing onto the yard.
- A “sitting room” that contains two Holbeins of Henry VIII’s soon to be executed chancellors Sir/Saint Thomas more and Thomas Cromwell, as well as overstuffed furniture and two hideous turn of the last century lamps with embroidered shades and the same silk-wrapped wiring they’ve have since they were purchased. How they haven’t shorted out and burned the whole place to the ground is not clear, but seriously? The trustees really should have those puppies rewired.
- An entire basement devoted to gallery space for exhibiting Frick’s works on paper by Raphael, Veronese, etc., etc. etc., etc.
- An art reference library that would be the making of most small colleges.
There’s so much art, of such extraordinary quality, that visual fatigue sets in long before one realizes that purchasing and restoring this glorious collection is probably why Frick tried to cut the wages on employees at the Homestead Works and hired Pinkertons to bash in the heads of striking steelworkers. Not for anyone who thinks the robber barons should have been collectively strung up by their scrota for their sins against the 99%.
The New Palace, Herrenchiemsee, Bavaria — what do you get when you combine an inbred and not especially stable German king with an unlimited budget, an obsession with grand opera, a love of glittery excess, and a devotion to building palaces that would put an anime-loving fanboy with a the latest and best 3-D building software to shame? Why, you get Mad King Ludwig II’s final and most overblown masterpiece, the New Palace at Herrenchiemsee!
You think I jest? Ha! This place puts any and everything Europe’s nuttiest monarch ever did to shame, and yes, I am including cultural icons like Neuschwanstein, the fairytale castle that was a love letter to Ludwig’s bestest buddy ever, the mercurial, grouchy, anti-Semitic, and decidedly straight composer Richard Wagner. Herrenchiemsee, which attempts to out-Versailles Versailles, complete with a Hall of Mirrors lit entirely by candles, a larger than life statue of Ludwig that makes him look majestic and complete untouched by the family insanity, a room with fixtures entirely of porcelain, a “Hall of War” that makes Ludwig look heroic and completely untouched by the family insanity, and a GIANT BLUE NIGHTLIGHT O’DOOM in the state bedroom because Ludwig may have cut a heroic figure on a terra cotta plaque but was actually terrified of the dark.
Even better? Not only did this place pretty much bankrupt the Bavarian state government...not only is the Hall of Mirrors longer than the original...not only is it in the middle of a lake where none of Ludwig’s uncultured and unwashed subjects could bother him….
The King lived here for less than a week.
Is it any wonder that this courtiers finally deposed him? Or that he went for a walk with his alienist, attempted to flee, and ended up drowning in a lake that is not Herrenchiemsee, ne’er to see his unfinished homage to Louis XIV and/or himself more?
Wouldn’t that make a great opera? Especially if they could somehow resurrect Wagner to write the score?
The Morgan Library, New York City — J.P. Morgan was, if anything, even less attractive a human being than Henry Clay Frick, even if he didn’t personally order a squad of strikebreakers to enforce a wage cut at his factory. Big, physically powerful, and cursed with a whopping case of rhinophyma that gave him a nose so horrible he refused to be photographed unless his nose was retouched to a normal size, he had such a dominant personality that he’s credited with ending a pre-Great War financial panic pretty much on his own. He had more money than God, almost literally, and woe betide anyone who got in his way, including Presidents and Cabinet secretaries.
He was also perhaps the single greatest collector of fine manuscripts and important early books since the Duc de Berry, patron of the Limbourgs and other 14th century miniaturists you’ve likely never heard of.
That’s what makes the Morgan such a stunning resource: its collection is so rich as to make art historians, medievalists, and SCA illuminators all but drop dead on the spot. 500 musical scores by the likes of Mozart, The Hours of Catherine of Cleves, thousands of rare Assyrian and Babylonian cylinder seals, hundreds of Rembrandt etchings, Gutenberg Bibles, Shakespeare folios and quart...Morgan had a taste for the best and an excellent instinct for how to indulge it, and oh great googly-moogly does it show.
Not only that? JP Morgan not only had the funds and the eye to amass the sort of wonders that probably had the directors over at the Metropolitan Museum ready to hire the Black Hand to steal it for their own galleries, he also had the money to build an entire GIANT RENAISSANCE-STYLE LIBRARY O’DOOM next to his town house, complete with mythological frescoes, a reading room somewhat larger than the average suburban house, and a study wallpapered with dark red silk brocade and decorated with Peruginos and other Old Masters for his personal delight.
It’s like someone plopped a nice little Medici palazzo smack into Murray Hill, and if you think I exaggerate, you would be wrong. This place is so over the top it comes close to achieving escape velocity, and I mean that only in the very best of ways.
Marble House, Newport, Rhode Island — as amazing, and appalling, as the Frick Mansion, the New Palace, and the Morgan Library are in terms of design, decor, and in-yo-face luxury, they are as a 1964 Rambler with a bad muffler and liberal amounts of rust next to a gleaming mint condition 1920 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost with the original butter-soft leather upholstery and limousine coachwork. They might be extraordinary, and the New Palace might have come close wrecking the Bavarian economy, but Marble House has one advantage over them all: it was built for a Vanderbilt.
And not just any Vanderbilt, oh no. Marble House, which was built between 1888 and 1892 for the then-hideous sum of $11 million (now over $289 million), was the modest summer retreat of William Kissam Vanderbilt and his wife Alva. A mere fifty rooms, run with a staff of only three dozen, this monument to Vanderbilt wealth, social power, and ability to throw enough money to run a small country into a dwelling occupied for a couple of months of the year was the first of the great Newport mansions that line the Cliff Walk and catch the cool Atlantic breezes for the delight of their owners.
Alas for William Kissam Vanderbilt, he only got to enjoy Marble House for a few brief seasons. Alva, a rich, haughty, spoiled, and iron-willed Southern belle, divorced William early in 1895, allegedly because of his adultery, and received $10 million in cash and several Vanderbilt estates in the divorce settlement. This allowed her to maintain Marble House, which she’d received as 39th birthday gift a few years earlier and which became her primary summer residence for decades to come.
The money also allowed her to finance the cause of women’s suffrage, the cause of Alva’s life when she wasn’t social climbing by marrying first a Vanderbilt and then a Belmont, bullying her daughter Consuelo into marrying the Duke of Marlborough, and building a piquant Chinese Tea House right by the Atlantic Ocean. The last, oddly enough, became a place where Alva and her fellow wealthy suffragettes planned their political campaign to get the vote.
As for what’s inside Marble House...here’s just a sampling:
- Marble walls, fixtures, and architectural elements that reportedly cost $7 million ($184 million today, and yes, that’s around two-thirds of the entire budget). Many of these are of different colors, like the pink marble dining room that gives one the uncomfortable impression not of eating a properly cooked steak, but being inside a properly cooked steak.
- A Gothic-themed room to display Alva’s medieval tchotchkes, complete with an exact replica of medieval financier Jacques Coeur’s fireplace.
- A Grand Salon that cribs quite a bit from the Galerie d’Apolon at the Louvre, only with more marble.
- The aforesaid Chinese Tea House, which may well be doomed once sea levels rise a few more meters.
- Bronze entry doors that each weigh over a ton.
- A two-story staircase of yellow marble surmounted by an 18th century ceiling that the Vanderbilts bought and installed because they could.
- Yet another 18th century ceiling, this one Venetian, depicting the goddess Athena. This one is in Alva’s bedroom.
- Half a million cubic feet of marble of diverse colors, patterns, and origins, never mind that all this stone makes the place clammy and briny in the fresh Atlantic breeze.
- A porte-cochere that bears an unsettling resemblance to the South Portico of the White House, only with fewer presidents and more marble.
Is it any wonder that millions of tourists have wandered through to gape at what happens when unlimited money meets conspicuous consumption? That Marble House doubled as Jay Gatsby’s Gold Coast mansion in the Robert Redford film? That Victoria’s Secret actually filmed a holiday commercial there? That it’s considered a national (or at least local) treasure?
Is it any wonder that I was unable to eat red meat for a few days after seeing the dining room?
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Have any of you, my faithful readers, ever visited these splendidly fussy places? Do you have a marble fireplace in your house? Have you ever heard of Alva Vanderbilt or Ludwig the Mad? Did you ever want to live in Avengers’ Mansion? Are you actually a billionaire? Speak up — we won’t tell a soul….
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