Wild Imagination: Art and Animals in the Gilded Age
August 30, 2024 – January 12, 2025
Rosecliff
Americans’ relationship with animals transformed during the Gilded Age (1870-1914). With a focus on Newport history, the exhibition explores how this exciting, tumultuous period shaped the role of animals in our modern world.
In the late 19th century, Americans moved in large numbers from farms to cities, losing touch with a rural way of life and with the closeness to nature and animals that defined it. Nostalgia for a lost kinship with animals pervaded urban, industrial America. At the same time, many were encountering new, “exotic” species through a boom in foreign travel, marine exploration and imperial expansion. More everyday Americans enjoyed natural history pursuits like birdwatching. Pet keeping surged. And while captive animals thrilled spectators at zoos and circuses, which both had their heyday in the Gilded Age, activists launched the nation’s first animal rights movement.
Newporters played a vital, though often contradictory, part in these developments. They fought at the vanguard of the animal rights movement yet set the era’s fashion for furs and feathers as residents of its most stylish summer resort. Newporters pampered their pets but expanded industries like the railroads that ravaged wildlife habitats.
Wild Imagination brings together a menagerie of animal-themed artworks and other objects, from paintings, sculptures, photographs and fashions to fancy dog collars and sea creatures blown in glass. These pieces reflect profound and lasting changes in human-animal relations. They also reveal the individual stories of wondrous creatures that continue to capture our imagination.
Exhibited works are drawn from the Newport mansions with additional loans from local partners at the Newport Historical Society, the Newport Restoration Foundation, the National Museum of American Illustration, Brown University, Castle Hill Inn, and the Museum at the International Tennis Hall of Fame.
Additional objects were generously loaned by Historic New England, Harvard University, the New-York Historical Society, New York University, Edith Wharton’s home The Mount, Trinity College, Maryhill Museum of Art, Maymont Estate, Mystic Seaport Museum, and the Columbus Museum of Art.
To learn more, click here.
PAST RELATED TALK
Art and Animals in the Gilded Age: Newport Stories
With Dr. Nicole Williams, Curator of Collections, The Preservation Society of Newport County
September 26, 2024 at 6pm
In-person at Rosecliff and via Zoom
During the exciting and tumultuous period between the Civil War and World War I, animals played an increasingly central role in Newporters’ social lives, scientific research and political activism. Dr. Williams charts how their attitudes toward animals transformed through a broad range of artworks, photographs, fashion and other objects drawn from the Preservation Society’s landmark properties. These artifacts reveal how the Gilded Age set the groundwork for our modern relationship with pampered pets, wondrous sea creatures and more. They also help us rethink animals as agents of history with stories and experiences all their own.
NEWS
We are proud to announce that The Celestial City: Newport and China, groundbreaking exhibition at Rosecliff from September 2023 to February 2024, has been honored by the American Association for State and Local History with its Award of Excellence.
The exhibition and accompanying programming shed light on a little-known aspect of Newport’s history: the contributions of Chinese and Chinese American individuals to life in Newport from the 18th century through the Gilded Age.
This prestigious award is a tribute to the thorough and thoughtful work of our Curator of Collections, Dr. Nicole Williams, and staff researchers who uncovered information and stories that had been untold for decades. Bravo!
To learn more about this exhibition, click here.
The Preservation Society of Newport County, Rhode Island, is a nonprofit organization accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. It is dedicated to preserving and interpreting the area’s historic architecture, landscapes, decorative arts and social history. Its 11 historic properties – seven of them National Historic Landmarks–span more than 250 years of American architectural and social development.
