The most Gilded Age house in America...
...and its relationship to Sargent, Wharton, and James
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Today I’d like to tell you about most Gilded Age of all houses, and its relationship to that era’s most noted chroniclers—John Singer Sargent, Edith Wharton, and Henry James. My husband and I toured it recently, while visiting friends.
This is the house: Biltmore Estate, outside Asheville, in western North Carolina.
It’s a 250-room, 175,00-square-foot chateau of a house, built over six years and finished in 1895. It perches on a hill facing Mt. Pisgah and the Blue Ridge Mountains. Architect Richard Morris Hunt designed the house for the 25-year-old George Vanderbilt, grandson of “Commodore” Vanderbilt, who’d built a shipping and railroad empire and a vast fortune.
George discovered Asheville and its mountain views when he brought his widowed mother here for her health (Asheville was a health-spa destination back then). At the time, he lived mostly in his mother’s Fifth Avenue mansion; he was a somewhat reclusive young man who collected art and books. He wanted a country place of his own, away from the social strictures of New York, Newport, and Bar Harbor, and Asheville struck a chord.
George quietly began to buy up land around Asheville, creating a large parcel with views of Mt. Pisgah and the Blue Ridge, and began consulting with Hunt and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. George then embarked on a research and buying trip with Hunt and and Hunt’s wife Catherine, touring French chateaux and buying Belgian tapestries, Impressionist paintings, Old Master prints and paintings, as one does.
George’s niece Consuelo Vanderbilt had recently married the Duke of Marlborough, so George and the Hunts also had access to English manors and castles like the Marlboroughs’ Blenheim Palace. (Side note: Sargent painted a family portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, from 1905, here. It was not a happy marriage, and they separated the year after this portrait.) To accommodate George’s art, tapestries, books, guests, and so on, the house’s 6500-square-foot design grew and grew to a footprint that covered four acres, with thirty-five bedrooms, many of them enormous, and 43 bathrooms, with multiple salons and living halls on three floors.
As hundreds of workmen built the house, another group began to execute Frederick Law Olmsted’s plans for a five-mile approach drive, gardens, and the fields and forests beyond the house—George’s acreage had now grown to 100,000 acres, including the distant Mt. Pisgah. (Fun fact: Biltmore hosted the nation’s first forestry school, which led to the founding of the Yale Forestry School.)
Today, the Biltmore estate’s gardens are vast, with multiple gardens over 75 acres, and they’re spectacular, especially the more naturalistic sections—you can still get a sense of Olmsted’s designs.
But back to 1895: When the enormous house was almost finished, George asked John Singer Sargent to come to Biltmore and paint commemorative portraits of Hunt and Olmsted. Sargent and Hunt rode south together on George’s private train car.
If these two portraits look a little strange, it’s because both Hunt and Olmsted were ill (Olmsted with dementia that his sons tried to hide). Neither man could stand for very long, so others had to pose in their place. I wonder what Sargent thought as he painted—these pictures seem rushed, not his best work, especially the Hunt portrait. The portrait of George Vanderbilt from a few years before feels much more like a Sargent portrait.
A few years later, at 35, George got married, to Edith Stuyvesant Dresser. Edith Dresser and her sisters were orphaned as girls and raised by their grandmother, and though she had no fortune, Edith Dresser came from one of the oldest Dutch/New York families—the insiders, in Edith Wharton’s novels. And as it happens, Edith Dresser, who’d grown up in New York and Newport, had known Edith Wharton from childhood on. Goerge and Edith Dresser got to know each other in Paris, where Edith and her sisters had moved to Paris to economize.
This Vanderbilt-Dresser marriage was like a coda to a Wharton novel—with George, from the brashest of outsider millionaire families, the Vanderbilts, marrying into the most insider, though a little threadbare, of old New York families.*
As to Edith Wharton, she and husband Teddy came to stay at Biltmore in 1902, around the time she began building her own Gilded Age Berkshires house, The Mount, and again at Christmas 1905, after her novel The House of Mirth was published. She’d also begun a writerly friendship with Henry James, who stayed at Biltmore in February 1905, while he was in the US visiting family and friends and giving talks. It seems likely that Edith Wharton suggested this visit. Henry had a bad attack of gout during his stay, and barely left his room. As he noted in a letter to Edith Wharton, he was not impressed with the enormous house, all alone in the wilderness, no other big country houses around:
“The whole land here is bound in snow and ice; we are 2500 feet in the air; the cold, the climate, is well nigh all the “company” in the strange, colossal, heartbreaking house; and the desolation and discomfort of the whole thing—whole scene—are, in spite of the mitigating millions everywhere expressed, indescribable.”
It was around this time that George Vanderbilt began to have money troubles—he’d spent far too much on Biltmore, and all its land, and on the community around it. To bring in some money, he rented out the Paris apartment on Rue de Varenne to Edith Wharton, and that apartment in Paris is where Wharton hit her stride, writing-wise and life-wise, and where she mostly lived, loved, and wrote for the rest of her life.
When George Vanderbilt died of a heart attack after an appendectomy in 1914—he was only 51—he was rumored to have left an estate of $50 million. But the true total, not including real estate (Biltmore; a New York City mansion; a house in Bar Harbor; a house in Washington, DC; and the Paris apartment) was around $900,000.
Maybe it’s fitting that as the Gilded Age was ending, the most Gilded-Age house had used up the most Gilded-Age fortune.
I’d love to tell you more about this beautiful yet monstrous (or in Henry James’ words, “strange, heartbreaking, colossal”) house and its gardens, and George and Edith Vanderbilt, not to mention Sargent and James and Wharton—but that will have to wait for another post. In the meantime, if you have questions, let me know and I’ll try to answer them.
Further reading:
The Last Castle, Denise Kiernan. A very readable biography of George Vanderbilt, Edith Vanderbilt, and Biltmore House and Estate, though I wish Kiernan had speculated a little more about all of the characters.
Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters: 1900-1915, Lyall Powers, editor. A readable collection of letters, most of them from James to Wharton, tracing a literary friendship.
More information on Biltmore history and visiting Biltmore: Biltmore estate website.
*Yes, the Vanderbilts’ ancestors were Dutch, like Edith Dresser’s forbears the Stuyvesant and Fish families, but the old New York families closed ranks against new-money millionaires like Commodore Vanderbilt. Wharton chronicled this social conflict in most of her novels.
This is so great-- I've never been to the Biltmore (or Asheville) and you give a vivid sense of its presence and history. I love the Sargent portrait of GWV! Is it there on site like the two other Sargent portraits? That's worth the trip alone. I'll have to make one.
(I confess I've had a lingering idea to write a whole book about 1895.... It just seems like such a dramatic turning point for the 20th century. Freud's Studies in Hysteria, the Oscar Wilde trial, the Lumiere brothers. The Biltmore wouldn't exactly fit in there but every time I see that year I asterisk it in my head, as context for my hypothetical book. Your post has the quality I admire, of reaching across fields and characters to see the pattern that connects them. Thanks for that!)
I ran a half marathon on the Biltmore grounds- a fun way to see the estate and gardens (though the race doesn't go inside the house). But that gives a person a sense of how vast the property is.