The Antiques of the Biltmore Estate

George Vanderbilt and the Biltmore House

Few places let a visitor walk into the daily surroundings of one of the richest American families at the turn of the 20th century. The Biltmore House in Asheville, North Carolina, does. In its day it was the largest private residence in America, and its contents cover nearly every field an antiques collector might follow: paintings, engravings, lithographs and prints, sculpture, furniture, tapestries, rugs, porcelain, glass, pottery, books, clocks, musical instruments, weaponry and silver, along with a conservatory of hothouse plants gathered from around the world.

George Washington Vanderbilt opened the house on Christmas Eve in 1895, after six years of construction, and even then it was not entirely finished. He was a bachelor through the whole project. In 1898 he married Edith Stuyvesant Dresser, and the couple had one child, Cornelia.

His father and grandfather built the Vanderbilt fortunes in shipping and railroads, but George preferred the life of a scholar and traveler. He spent an extended period each year in Europe, Africa and Asia and was fluent in seven languages. He still meant Biltmore to earn its keep. The estate ran a dairy that succeeded for many years, and its farms produced vegetables, meat and honey from 41 beehives. The forests yielded 3,000 cords of wood a year for the estate mill, and a 300-acre nursery offered 5 million plants for sale.

Building Biltmore: limestone, marble and an army of workers

The four-story stone house has a front facade 375 feet long. About 1,000 masons, carpenters and artisans worked on it over six years, and a village was built outside the property just to house them. Each day they traveled about three miles into the estate to start work.

A private rail spur brought in materials, including limestone shipped 600 miles from Indiana and marble from Italy. On-site factories and sheds held woodcarvers, a kiln that turned out 32,000 bricks a day, and woodworkers who made the oak and walnut flooring. A nursery propagated 2,935,615 plants for the grounds; with another half million or so collected or bought locally, 2,870,675 were eventually planted on the estate.

The house was also advanced for its time. Vanderbilt installed electricity, telephones, central heating, mechanical refrigeration, elevators, fire alarms and central plumbing. Indoor bathrooms were a luxury, and Biltmore had 43 of them, with legged tubs and running water. For recreation there was a bowling alley with wooden balls of different sizes for different games, a swimming pool with underwater lights, a gym and private dressing rooms.

To furnish all this, Vanderbilt bought custom-made furniture in English, Continental and American styles in Europe and the United States. Several rooms take their names from their furniture: the Chippendale Room, the Sheraton Room and the Louis XVI Room. Throughout the living areas, hardwood floors are laid in a herringbone pattern.

The Banquet Hall and its 16th-century Flemish tapestries

The Banquet Hall recalls the feasting halls of English legend. At its center is an oak dining table with 64 chairs, and the acoustics are said to let two people at opposite ends talk without raising their voices. Around it are two built-in, gilt-trimmed throne chairs, triple fireplaces flanked by armor dating from the 1400s to the 1800s, a high-relief panel titled “Return from the Chase,” a built-in sideboard holding 18th- and 19th-century copper and brass vessels from Spain, France and Holland, and an organ gallery. The restored period organ was not part of the original fittings; it plays automatically for visitors at timed intervals.

On the walls hang five of a set of seven Flemish tapestries woven in silk, wool and metallic thread between 1546 and 1553. They tell the Roman story of Venus, her lover Mars, god of war, and her jealous husband Vulcan, god of fire. Each appears to be about 15 feet tall and 30 to 40 feet long.

Napoleon’s chess table and the Salon

When the men withdrew to the Billiard Room, or to the Smoking Room and Gun Room in the Bachelors’ Hall, the women often gathered in the Salon to read, talk or play cribbage, checkers, mah-jongg, whist or euchre. Chess could be played on an Empire walnut game table with ivory pieces that Napoleon used during his exile on St. Helena from 1815 to 1821.

The room also holds velvet hangings made for Cardinal Richelieu, the 17th-century French statesman, worked in metal-thread couching with the cardinal’s hat and coat of arms. The furniture includes a 19th-century Louis XV-style settee and armchairs in their original tapestry upholstery and an 18th-century Rococo bombé commode. Among the prints on the walls are woodblock engravings by Albrecht Dürer (1471 to 1528), “The Emperor Maximilian I” and “Hercules Killing Euryptos.”

The Biltmore library: 23,000 books in eight languages

Vanderbilt kept a journal of the books he read, sometimes listing several in a single week. He built a collection of 23,000 volumes in eight languages, and about 10,000 of them line the library wall to wall, two stories high. Many are first editions, and nearly all are leather-bound with gilt edges. He employed a librarian to catalog them. Henry James, visiting in 1905, complained that his bedroom was half a mile from the “mile-long library.”

Overhead is “The Chariot of Aurora” by Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini (1675 to 1741), painted for the Pisani Palace in Venice. It measures 64 by 32 feet on 13 canvases and shows the dawn, a symbol of the light of learning. Giant Ming Dynasty urns once used as goldfish bowls stand among walnut and silk damask settees, armchairs and side chairs in 19th-century Baroque style.

Edith Vanderbilt’s bedroom is just as carefully preserved. A descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, the first governor of Dutch colonial New York, she was orphaned at 10 and raised by her grandmother. Her oval room, in gold and purple, has golden silk walls, Savonnerie carpets, cut-velvet drapes, two French marble-topped commodes, a print by Peter Paul Rubens and a Louis XV clock by Philippe Barat decorated with porcelain figures and flowers.

Dürer’s Triumphal Arch, Meissen apostles and 1,600 prints

The Music Room was planned but never finished in Vanderbilt’s time; it was restored and opened in 1970. It holds a 20th-century Steinway piano, but the eye goes to the “Triumphal Arch of Maximilian,” a woodcut that Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (1459 to 1519) commissioned from Albrecht Dürer and others around 1515. The Biltmore impression dates from the 18th century. About ten feet tall and wide and printed from 192 separate blocks, it records the emperor’s military and political events, his accomplishments in languages and hunting, and his family tree.

The same room displays Meissen porcelain figures of the 12 Apostles from the mid-1700s, modeled by Johann Joachim Kändler and drawn from several sets made for the Habsburg empresses Amalia and Maria Theresa. Collectors who follow European porcelain may also enjoy the guides to Royal Bayreuth porcelain and Limoges.

Elsewhere, the Chippendale Room holds two paintings by Renoir, “Young Algerian Girl” and “Child with an Orange.” Vanderbilt collected about 1,600 etchings, woodcuts, aquatints, photogravures and other prints, and they fill the walls of the rooms and halls. One buying trip to Japan sent 11 crates of porcelain, lacquerware, netsuke and three samurai swords home to Biltmore. During World War II, the National Gallery of Art in Washington stored paintings at the house in case the war went badly.

After Vanderbilt died unexpectedly in 1914 following an emergency appendectomy, the house passed in time to Cornelia’s sons. During the Depression the City of Asheville asked them to open it to tourists, and even at the then-steep price of $1, Biltmore drew many visitors. It belongs in the same company as William Randolph Hearst’s collection among the great American houses built to hold a lifetime of buying.