Rosecliff
Encyclopedia
Rosecliff, built 1898-1902, is one of the Gilded Age
mansion
s of Newport, Rhode Island
, now open to the public as a museum.
The house has also been known as the Herman Oelrichs House or the J. Edgar Monroe House.
It was built by Theresa Fair Oelrichs, a silver heiress from Nevada
, whose father James Graham Fair was one of the four partners in the Comstock Lode
. She was the wife of Hermann Oelrichs
, American agent for Norddeutscher Lloyd
steamship line. She and her husband, together with her sister, Virginia Fair
, bought the land in 1891 from the estate of George Bancroft
, and commissioned the architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White
to design a summer home suitable for entertaining on a grand scale. With little opportunity to channel her considerable energy elsewhere, she "threw herself into the social scene with tremendous gusto, becoming, with Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish
and Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont
(of nearby Belcourt
) one of the three great hostesses of Newport."
The principal architect, Stanford White
, modeled the mansion after the Grand Trianon
of Versailles
, but smaller and reduced to a basic "H" shape, while keeping Mansart's scheme of a glazed arcade of arched windows and paired Ionic pilasters
, which increase to columns across the central loggia. White's Rosecliff adds to the Grand Trianon a second storey with a balustraded roofline that conceals the set-back third storey, containing twenty small servants' rooms and the pressing room for the laundry.
in 1898, and the New York branch of Jules Allard and Sons
were engaged as interior decorators. Construction started in 1899, but the sharp winter slowed construction; Mrs. Oelrichs' sister had married William K. Vanderbilt II that winter season, and the house was required for parties in the following Newport season; the eager Mrs. Oelrichs moved in July 1900, sending the workmen out in order to give a first party in August, a dinner for one hundred and twelve before Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish's Harvest Festival Ball at Crossways; ferns and floral arrangements concealed the unfinished areas. The house was not completed until 1902.
Rosecliff's brick construction is clad in white architectural terracotta tiles. Stanford White's sophisticated spatial planning offered unexpected views en filade through aligned doorways centered on handsome monumental fireplaces with projecting overmantels.
The central corps de logis
is entirely taken up with the ballroom, as it appeared on White's plans, which with the Louis XIV furniture removed could serve as Newport's largest ballroom, 40 by 80 feet. Its scheme of single and paired Corinthian pilasters
alternating with arch-headed windows and recessed doorways echoes the articulation of the exterior, which is reached through the French doors on either side, to a plain terrace dropping by broad stairs to the lawn facing the ocean, or to a planted terrace garden with a central fountain.
In the northern of the wings that project on both sides from the central block, is a dining room and a billiard room separated by a marble anteroom backed, on the service side, by a butler's pantry with two dumbwaiters communicating with the all-but-subterranean kitchens below, which were lit invisibly from the sunken service yard on the north side of the house. The main entrance on the opposite south wing is through a vestibule, where the exterior Ionic order is carried inside, now suitably enriched, under an emphatic cornice that divides the height 2:3.
The vestibule is separated by a tripartite screen, with an arched central opening flanked above the cornice by bull's-eye openings in which baroque
vases stand, from a grand Stair Hall that projects from the south block to accommodate a grand stair that sweeps forward through a heart-shaped opening into the floor space and divides at a landing to return in matched recurving flights to the upper floor.
Beyond the Stair Hall is the Salon with the same proportions as the Dining Room (3:4, or 30 by 40 feet) and like it, originally hung with tapestry
. Its ceiling is coffer
ed. Its overscaled Gothic fireplace of Caen stone
is the one eclectic anomaly in Rosecliff's interiors.
Upstairs, three grand bedrooms of equal importance and guest bedrooms of graduated sizes may be linked by opened doors or isolated by locked ones, in a flexible arrangement of rooms or suites, all with baths, and all separated from the wide corridor by intervening dressing closets for hermetic privacy from the staff, who moved up and down stairs by means of two small service stairs contrived in spaces smaller than the master bedrooms' walk-in closets.
The most famous of Mrs. Oelrich's parties was the "Bal blanc" of 19 August 1904 to celebrate the Astor Cup Races, in which everything was white and silver.
, who opened it to the public for tours. Mr Monroe often would come back to the estate for charity events up until his death in 1991.
The ballroom
was used to film scenes for the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby
, The Betsy
, High Society, True Lies
, and Amistad.
Gilded Age
In United States history, the Gilded Age refers to the era of rapid economic and population growth in the United States during the post–Civil War and post-Reconstruction eras of the late 19th century. The term "Gilded Age" was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their book The Gilded...
mansion
Mansion
A mansion is a very large dwelling house. U.S. real estate brokers define a mansion as a dwelling of over . A traditional European mansion was defined as a house which contained a ballroom and tens of bedrooms...
s of Newport, Rhode Island
Newport, Rhode Island
Newport is a city on Aquidneck Island in Newport County, Rhode Island, United States, about south of Providence. Known as a New England summer resort and for the famous Newport Mansions, it is the home of Salve Regina University and Naval Station Newport which houses the United States Naval War...
, now open to the public as a museum.
The house has also been known as the Herman Oelrichs House or the J. Edgar Monroe House.
It was built by Theresa Fair Oelrichs, a silver heiress from Nevada
Nevada
Nevada is a state in the western, mountain west, and southwestern regions of the United States. With an area of and a population of about 2.7 million, it is the 7th-largest and 35th-most populous state. Over two-thirds of Nevada's people live in the Las Vegas metropolitan area, which contains its...
, whose father James Graham Fair was one of the four partners in the Comstock Lode
Comstock Lode
The Comstock Lode was the first major U.S. discovery of silver ore, located under what is now Virginia City, Nevada, on the eastern slope of Mount Davidson, a peak in the Virginia Range. After the discovery was made public in 1859, prospectors rushed to the area and scrambled to stake their claims...
. She was the wife of Hermann Oelrichs
Hermann Oelrichs
Hermann Oelrichs , was an American businessman, multimillionaire, and owner of Norddeutsche Lloyd shipping. The grandson of a German immigrant, Oelrichs was married in 1890 to Teresa Alice Fair, daughter of United States Senator and Comstock Lode millionaire James Graham Fair...
, American agent for Norddeutscher Lloyd
Norddeutscher Lloyd
Norddeutsche Lloyd was a German shipping company. It was founded by Hermann Henrich Meier and Eduard Crüsemann in Bremen on February 20, 1857. It developed into one of the most important German shipping companies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and was instrumental in the economic...
steamship line. She and her husband, together with her sister, Virginia Fair
Virginia Fair Vanderbilt
Virginia Fair Vanderbilt was an American socialite, hotel builder/owner, philanthropist, owner of Fair Stable, a Thoroughbred racehorse operation, and a member of the prominent Vanderbilt family.-Biography:...
, bought the land in 1891 from the estate of George Bancroft
George Bancroft
George Bancroft was an American historian and statesman who was prominent in promoting secondary education both in his home state and at the national level. During his tenure as U.S. Secretary of the Navy, he established the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1845...
, and commissioned the architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White
McKim, Mead, and White
McKim, Mead & White was a prominent American architectural firm at the turn of the twentieth century and in the history of American architecture. The firm's founding partners were Charles Follen McKim , William Rutherford Mead and Stanford White...
to design a summer home suitable for entertaining on a grand scale. With little opportunity to channel her considerable energy elsewhere, she "threw herself into the social scene with tremendous gusto, becoming, with Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish
Stuyvesant Fish
Stuyvesant Fish was president of the Illinois Central Railroad.Fish was born in New York City, the son of Hamilton Fish and his wife Julia Ursin Niemcewicz, née Kean. A graduate of Columbia College, he was later an executive of the Illinois Central Railroad, and as its president from 1887 to 1906...
and Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont
Alva Belmont
Alva Erskine Belmont , née Alva Erskine Smith, also called Alva Vanderbilt from 1875 to 1896, was a prominent multi-millionaire American socialite and a major figure in the women's suffrage movement...
(of nearby Belcourt
Belcourt Castle
Belcourt Castle is the former summer cottage of Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, located on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island. Begun in 1891 and completed in 1894, it was intended to be used for only six to eight weeks of the year...
) one of the three great hostesses of Newport."
The principal architect, Stanford White
Stanford White
Stanford White was an American architect and partner in the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White, the frontrunner among Beaux-Arts firms. He designed a long series of houses for the rich and the very rich, and various public, institutional, and religious buildings, some of which can be found...
, modeled the mansion after the Grand Trianon
Grand Trianon
The Grand Trianon was built in the northwestern part of the Domain of Versailles at the request of Louis XIV, as a retreat for the King and his maîtresse en titre of the time, the marquise de Montespan, and as a place where the King and invited guests could take light meals away from the strict...
of Versailles
Palace of Versailles
The Palace of Versailles , or simply Versailles, is a royal château in Versailles in the Île-de-France region of France. In French it is the Château de Versailles....
, but smaller and reduced to a basic "H" shape, while keeping Mansart's scheme of a glazed arcade of arched windows and paired Ionic pilasters
Ionic order
The Ionic order forms one of the three orders or organizational systems of classical architecture, the other two canonic orders being the Doric and the Corinthian...
, which increase to columns across the central loggia. White's Rosecliff adds to the Grand Trianon a second storey with a balustraded roofline that conceals the set-back third storey, containing twenty small servants' rooms and the pressing room for the laundry.
Construction and Interiors
The commission was given to McKim, Mead, and WhiteMcKim, Mead, and White
McKim, Mead & White was a prominent American architectural firm at the turn of the twentieth century and in the history of American architecture. The firm's founding partners were Charles Follen McKim , William Rutherford Mead and Stanford White...
in 1898, and the New York branch of Jules Allard and Sons
Jules Allard and Sons
The Parisian firm of Jules Allard and Sons , in business between 1878 and Allard's death in 1907, was one of the most notable interior decorating houses of the turn of the twentieth century. The firm opened a New York branch in 1885...
were engaged as interior decorators. Construction started in 1899, but the sharp winter slowed construction; Mrs. Oelrichs' sister had married William K. Vanderbilt II that winter season, and the house was required for parties in the following Newport season; the eager Mrs. Oelrichs moved in July 1900, sending the workmen out in order to give a first party in August, a dinner for one hundred and twelve before Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish's Harvest Festival Ball at Crossways; ferns and floral arrangements concealed the unfinished areas. The house was not completed until 1902.
Rosecliff's brick construction is clad in white architectural terracotta tiles. Stanford White's sophisticated spatial planning offered unexpected views en filade through aligned doorways centered on handsome monumental fireplaces with projecting overmantels.
The central corps de logis
Corps de logis
Corps de logis is the architectural term which refers to the principal block of a large, usually classical, mansion or palace. It contains the principal rooms, state apartments and an entry. The grandest and finest rooms are often on the first floor above the ground level: this floor is the...
is entirely taken up with the ballroom, as it appeared on White's plans, which with the Louis XIV furniture removed could serve as Newport's largest ballroom, 40 by 80 feet. Its scheme of single and paired Corinthian pilasters
Corinthian order
The Corinthian order is one of the three principal classical orders of ancient Greek and Roman architecture. The other two are the Doric and Ionic. When classical architecture was revived during the Renaissance, two more orders were added to the canon, the Tuscan order and the Composite order...
alternating with arch-headed windows and recessed doorways echoes the articulation of the exterior, which is reached through the French doors on either side, to a plain terrace dropping by broad stairs to the lawn facing the ocean, or to a planted terrace garden with a central fountain.
In the northern of the wings that project on both sides from the central block, is a dining room and a billiard room separated by a marble anteroom backed, on the service side, by a butler's pantry with two dumbwaiters communicating with the all-but-subterranean kitchens below, which were lit invisibly from the sunken service yard on the north side of the house. The main entrance on the opposite south wing is through a vestibule, where the exterior Ionic order is carried inside, now suitably enriched, under an emphatic cornice that divides the height 2:3.
The vestibule is separated by a tripartite screen, with an arched central opening flanked above the cornice by bull's-eye openings in which baroque
Baroque
The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...
vases stand, from a grand Stair Hall that projects from the south block to accommodate a grand stair that sweeps forward through a heart-shaped opening into the floor space and divides at a landing to return in matched recurving flights to the upper floor.
Beyond the Stair Hall is the Salon with the same proportions as the Dining Room (3:4, or 30 by 40 feet) and like it, originally hung with tapestry
Tapestry
Tapestry is a form of textile art, traditionally woven on a vertical loom, however it can also be woven on a floor loom as well. It is composed of two sets of interlaced threads, those running parallel to the length and those parallel to the width ; the warp threads are set up under tension on a...
. Its ceiling is coffer
Coffer
A coffer in architecture, is a sunken panel in the shape of a square, rectangle, or octagon in a ceiling, soffit or vault...
ed. Its overscaled Gothic fireplace of Caen stone
Caen stone
Caen stone or Pierre de Caen, is a light creamy-yellow Jurassic limestone quarried in northwestern France near the city of Caen.The limestone is a fine grained oolitic limestone formed in shallow water lagoons in the Bathonian Age about 167 million years ago...
is the one eclectic anomaly in Rosecliff's interiors.
Upstairs, three grand bedrooms of equal importance and guest bedrooms of graduated sizes may be linked by opened doors or isolated by locked ones, in a flexible arrangement of rooms or suites, all with baths, and all separated from the wide corridor by intervening dressing closets for hermetic privacy from the staff, who moved up and down stairs by means of two small service stairs contrived in spaces smaller than the master bedrooms' walk-in closets.
The most famous of Mrs. Oelrich's parties was the "Bal blanc" of 19 August 1904 to celebrate the Astor Cup Races, in which everything was white and silver.
The Monroe Family
Rosecliff stayed in the Oelrichs family until 1941, then went through several changes of ownership before being bought by Mr & Mrs J. Edgar Monroe of New Orleans in 1947. Mr. Monroe, a southern gentleman who had made his fortune in the ship building industry, came to Newport with his wife Louise every summer to escape the summer heat of the Deep South. The two became well known for the large parties they threw at Rosecliff; many of which had mardi gras theme, the Monroes loved dressing up in fancy costumes for these parties. Unlike Mrs. Oelrichs' parties, which were stiff and formal, the Monroes' parties were laid back and easy going. Because Hermann Oelrichs Jr had sold off all the furnishings in 1941, nearly all the furnishings visitors see at Rosecliff today are from the Monroe period of occupation. In 1971, Mr. and Mrs. Monroe donated the entire estate with its contents and a $2 million operating endowment to the Preservation Society of Newport CountyPreservation Society of Newport County
The Preservation Society of Newport County is a private, non-profit organization based in Newport, Rhode Island. It is Rhode Island's largest and most-visited cultural organization. The organization's mission is to preserve the architectural heritage of Newport County, Rhode Island, including...
, who opened it to the public for tours. Mr Monroe often would come back to the estate for charity events up until his death in 1991.
The ballroom
Ballroom
A ballroom is a large room inside a building, the designated purpose of which is holding formal dances called balls. Traditionally, most balls were held in private residences; many mansions contain one or more ballrooms...
was used to film scenes for the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby (1974 film)
The Great Gatsby is a 1974 romantic drama film distributed by Newdon Productions and Paramount Pictures. It was directed by Jack Clayton and produced by David Merrick, from a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola based on F...
, The Betsy
The Betsy
The Betsy is a 1978 film made by the Harold Robbins International Company and released by Allied Artists. It was directed by Daniel Petrie and produced by Robert R. Weston and Emanuel L. Wolf with Jack Grossberg as associate producer. The screenplay was by William Bast and Walter Bernstein, adapted...
, High Society, True Lies
True Lies
True Lies is a 1994 American action-comedy film directed by James Cameron and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Arnold, Bill Paxton, Tia Carrere, Charlton Heston, and Art Malik. Eliza Dushku also appears in the film in one of her first major film roles...
, and Amistad.