The Breakers: Grace and Grandeur

In this installment of ‘Larger Than Life: Architecture Through the Ages,’ we tour the Vanderbilt’s Gilded Age masterpiece.

The largest and most opulent of Newport's Gilded Age mansions, The Breakers sits on 13 acres overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. A 12-foot limestone and iron fence borders the property on three sides, flanked by dense plantings of rhododendrons and ornamental dogwoods. The grounds are home to several rare tree varieties, including weeping beeches and Blue Atlas cedar. The Preservation Society of Newport County

Mark Twain, who coined the term “Gilded Age,” characterized the era as glittering on the surface but deeply flawed beneath. Beginning in the 1870s, rapid industrialization generated vast wealth even as poverty, corruption, and inequality persisted.

Few figures embodied this contradiction more sharply than the women who moved through it. None illustrated the era’s competing impulses more vividly than two sisters-in-law at the very pinnacle of American society: the ambitious Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, who wielded wealth as an instrument of power, and Alice Vanderbilt, who could not have been more different.