Around 1715 a German immigrant artist named Justus Kuhn painted one of the young sons of the Maryland oligarchy, Henry Darnall III: a 10-year-old baroque doll, gazed at by an adoring slave boy in a silver collar. The balustrade behind him and the formal gardens and pavilions behind that are complete fictions. No properties in America looked like this. Kuhn was meeting the illusory desire of Colonial gentry to seem like important extensions of European culture. It would be a recurrent fantasy. Fifty years later, in Boston, one sees John Singleton Copley doing much the same in some of his portraits. But in another hundred years, with the growth of American wealth, grandeur began to get real.
The American appetite for it reached its apogee in the three decades from the mid-1870s to the early 1900s. This has since been christened, with every reason, the Gilded Age: the time of huge, unfettered industrial expansion; of unassailable and mutually interlocking trusts, combines and cartels; of rampant money acting under laws it wrote for itself. "Get rich," wrote Mark Twain sardonically, "dishonestly if we can, honestly if we must." From this culture of greed arose the primal names of American business: Rockefeller (oil), Carnegie and Frick (steel), Vanderbilt (railroads), the Goulds, Astors, Fisks and, towering over them all, the magister ludi of saber-toothed capitalism, J. Pierpont Morgan. After 1870, America lost all its Puritan inhibitions about the gratuitous display of surplus wealth.
The superrich built themselves palaces on New York City's Fifth and Park avenues, which were much satirized. But the red-hot site of Gilded Age extravagance was Newport, Rhode Island, where the very rich congregated in the summer. Here, in what they called with false modesty their "cottages," they engaged in rituals of consumption and display that were so extreme, competitive and self-referential that they eclipsed anything done in private American building before or since. Newport confirms the piercing insight of Henry Adams, lamenting the crassness of his time: "The American wasted more money more recklessly than anyone ever did before; he spent more to less purpose than any extravagant court-aristocracy; he had no sense of relative values."
The Bernini of the swells was Richard Morris Hunt (1827-95), the most influential American architect of the 19th century. The poor have always wondered how the rich live. But more to the point in America, the rich have always wondered too. Wealth on the scale of the 1880s in the U.S. was still uncharted territory. Its signs could get crossed. So the plutocrat needed an architect to create a seamless etiquette of shared ostentation, with variants, and that was what Hunt did with Newport.