Tea at Trianon: Rosecliff

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, September 2, 2018

Rosecliff

Based upon the Grand Trianon at Versailles, Rosecliff "cottage" in Newport exceeds in opulence the grandeur of the original. From the New York Social Diary:

Herman Oelrichs was almost forty, and had never been married. The year after they met, Herman married Tessie. The couple’s wedding present from the father was a check for a million dollars. A million dollars then would be like $40 million today.

These were the days of the Gilded Age. The haute monde of New York did not go to the Hamptons, they went to Newport where they built enormous houses and in some cases, palaces, and in a pretentious bid for modesty, referred to them as “cottages.” By the mid-1890s, both Vanderbilt palaces in Newport – Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s The Breakers and his brother William K. Vanderbilt’s Marble House -- had been completed. These houses set the tone for future “cottages” of any importance. Tessie Oelrichs got the message, and she intended to abide by it.

The Oelrichs bought fourteen acres right on the ocean and Bellevue Avenue called Rosecliff. The place had been owned by man named George Bancroft who raised roses (and created the American Beauty Rose). The original house was ample and wooden and comfortable, but to the young, rich and socially ambitious Mrs. Oelrichs, it was what today is called a “teardown.” And down it came.

Stanford White, a contemporary and social peer of Hermann Oelrichs, and one of the hottest architects of the day for the very rich, was consulted. The popular architecture for the rich was something they called “scientific eclecticism” -- buildings that reflected a specific historic prototype, i.e., Renaissance, Roman, Egyptian, Greek, etc. Whatever the style, it was reworked from the original to accommodate the progress of modern man, like electricity, heat, plumbing. For the new Rosecliff and for Tessie Oelrichs a little girl from Virginia City, Nevada, White proposed a model of Jules Hardouin Mansart’s Grand Trianon at Versailles. Fit for a queen. (Read more.)