Wild Imagination: Art and Animals in the Gilded Age
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.
Exhibition was open August 30, 2024 – January 12, 2025.
Take a virtual tour of the Wild Imagination exhibition
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.
In addition to items from the Newport Mansions collections, objects in this exhibition are generously loaned by the following institutions:
Brown University
Castle Hill Inn
Columbus Museum of Art
Harvard University
Historic New England
Maryhill Museum of Art
The Mount, Edith Wharton’s home
Museum at the International Tennis Hall of Fame
Mystic Seaport Museum
National Museum of American Illustration
Newport Historical Society
Newport Restoration Foundation
New-York Historical Society
New York University
Trinity College
Selected objects in the exhibition
Cat in a Crate
S.S. David (American, 1847-1898), c. 1887
Oil on canvas stretched around box
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: Museum Purchase with funds provided by Loann Crane and the Derby and Howald Funds. 2019.026.
More Tours, Events & Exhibitions
Beneath The Breakers Tour
Daily
10:00am
Explore the underground systems that made this great house a marvel of technology for its time.
Third Floor Preservation in Progress Tour
Daily
12 pm and 2 pm
For the first time in the 129-year history of The Breakers, the private third-floor family space occupied by generations of Vanderbilts is open for public tours.
Servant Life Tour
Daily
10 am and 2 pm
See and hear how the other half lived. This tour will highlight the stories of some of the men and women who worked to service the social whirl of Newport during the Gilded Age.
Lifting the Curtain: Behind the Scenes of Museum Work
January 23 – April 10, 2025
11:00am – 12:30pm
This series of programs, listed below, offers glimpses into the work that happens behind the scenes at the Newport Mansions, including curatorial, conservation, preservation, historical research and interpretation.
