The Diverse Collection of William Randolph Hearst

The Gothic Study at Hearst Castle

Painted characters act out scenes from folk tales and the Bible on the arches of what was once William Randolph Hearst’s private study. On a ledge below the clerestory windows stand a Spanish polychrome reliquary bust of a saint, a stone Madonna and Child from France and one of a pair of 15th-century Italian iron brackets shaped like roosters.

Bookcases hold volumes, many signed by their authors. Cabinets display silver, ivory and majolica vessels: a monstrance, a tankard, a cup and a drinking horn. A 16th-century French mantelpiece flanked by Gothic limestone arches fills most of one wall, and around the room are an elaborate Augsburg clock, brass candlesticks, iron lecterns and Persian carpets.

On a table in the middle lies a newspaper, an ordinary object in a fitting spot. The Gothic Study was the hub of Hearst’s publishing empire whenever he was at San Simeon, the estate he called “the ranch,” in the Santa Lucia Mountains on California’s Central Coast.

Building Hearst Castle with Julia Morgan, 1919 to 1947

Construction began in 1919 on “Camp Hill,” where the family had camped during William’s childhood. The fortune came from his father, George Hearst, through silver mining and later investments. William inherited it from his mother, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, when she died in the 1919 influenza epidemic, and it paid for the project.

Hearst shaped the ever-changing design with architect Julia Morgan, trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, until work stopped in 1947. Almost three decades produced a main house and three smaller guest houses in the Mediterranean Revival style, mixing Spanish and Italian elements among Mediterranean plants and trees. The hilltop resembles a European village, with the towered main house as its cathedral.

Morgan drew on buildings she had seen traveling, especially in Spain and Italy. The American world’s fairs around 1900 may also have played a part. The Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 in San Francisco, which Hearst helped finance, marked the opening of the Panama Canal with a great deal of Spanish-Moorish architecture, a style plain in the buildings and art at San Simeon.

Exteriors and interiors were assembled from antique elements, mostly Spanish and Italian, filled out with new work by Hearst’s craftsmen, giving the house a physical link to the traditions of Europe.

Why Hearst collected differently from J.P. Morgan and Mellon

Many newly rich American collectors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries wanted that link. J.P. Morgan, Isabella Stewart Gardner and Andrew Mellon bought works that became the core of major American museums, probably with eventual public display in mind. The same impulse produced houses such as George Vanderbilt’s Biltmore Estate.

Hearst also gave or sold much art to American museums, but the San Simeon collection survives intact and in place, as it was while he lived there. All of it was bought to be used and enjoyed.

He bought from the same dealers and auction houses as his rivals and often fought them for the same pieces. The difference was that he bought more, and more eclectically, perhaps because he had many houses to furnish. Wyntoon, a village of Bavarian chalets in Northern California, received much of the Germanic material. Silver often went to St. Donat’s, his 14th-century castle in Wales. San Simeon focused on Spanish and Italian work.

William Randolph Hearst as a young collector and publisher

The habit started in 1873, when the ten-year-old Hearst toured Europe with his mother and bought coins, stamps, beer steins and porcelain. On the same trip he asked her to buy the Louvre.

Phoebe Hearst was a collector and connoisseur herself and surely influenced him. In his thirties he began collecting in earnest, studying auction catalogues, traveling abroad and spending lavishly, and he added manuscripts, rare books and autographs.

At 23 he became publisher and editor of the San Francisco Examiner, a struggling paper his father owned. He turned it around, bought papers in other major cities, founded or bought many magazines, and later moved into newsreels and feature films.

Film people, politicians, writers and athletes spent weekends at San Simeon, sleeping in 16th-century beds and sitting by fires under 500-year-old mantels. In a Newsweek interview on May 6, 1946, asked whether his pleasure in his art matched what he had spent, Hearst said his own enjoyment was second in importance to the enjoyment others got from it.

Doorknockers, Greek vases and Sekhmet: the range of the Hearst collection

He also put antique parts to everyday use. His houses had antique andirons, pokers and grates as well as mantels. Wrought-iron candlestands became floor lamps, marble columns became pedestals, iron grilles guarded windows, and antique ceilings were built into the structure, sometimes altered by his craftsmen.

His taste for objects other great collectors ignored earned him a reputation as something of a maverick: doorknockers, warming pans, tile stoves, musical instruments, pipes and lanterns, alongside paintings, sculpture, tapestries and silver.

The mainstream art is often very fine. A collection of 155 Greek vases circles the library on its cornice. Classical sarcophagi line the garden esplanade. Four Egyptian sculptures of the lion-faced goddess Sekhmet, dated 1300 to 1600 B.C., form a fountain designed by Julia Morgan. Outdoor sculpture in limestone, marble, granite and bronze spans the 16th century B.C. to the 20th century A.D.

Indoors, wood, sometimes polychromed or gilded, joins those materials. Bronze river gods recline on tables, marble lions crouch on stairways, and saints and Holy Family groups fill the rooms.

Paintings, textiles and 45 Spanish tables

Religious subjects dominate because most Spanish and Italian Renaissance art, the bulk of the collection, is devotional, not because of any special piety. The Madonna and Child is the most common theme; the earliest example is a 14th-century work attributed to the School of Duccio di Buoninsegna. Collectors of devotional art such as Catherine Hicks with her Madonnas would know the type. Diptychs and altarpieces from northern and southern Europe hang in several rooms.

Secular works include royal portraits by Franz Xaver Winterhalter and Napoleonic scenes by Jean-Léon Gérôme, among them Bonaparte Before the Sphinx of about 1867 to 1868, under elaborately painted ceilings.

Oriental carpets, many inherited from Hearst’s mother, cover floors or hang as decoration. Renaissance copes and chasubles hang on the walls, and altar frontals hang above fireplaces and beds.

The furniture, mostly 16th- and 17th-century Spanish and Italian, shows his buying best. Where many museums own four or five 17th-century Spanish tables, San Simeon has 45, with similar numbers of chairs and chests, a valuable resource for research into how such furniture was made.

The Gimbel Brothers sale and the gift to California

From 1937, a financial crisis made worse by the Depression led to sales of Hearst possessions at auction and privately. Many items were sold to the public through the Gimbel Brothers department store in New York, raising at least $11 million in the first year.

The 1941 catalogue offered about 20,000 objects, including paintings by van Dyck, crosiers, chalices, pulpits, stained glass, arms and armor, mirrors, fire screens, Charles Dickens’s sideboard, George Washington’s waistcoat and Thomas Jefferson’s Bible.

Variety still defines the house. In the Doge’s Suite a Lalique frosted glass bottle sits near a 16th-century majolica inkwell shaped like St. George and an Egyptian black granite sculpture from the fourth to first century B.C. More objects with famous pasts appear in Famous Antiques.

In 1957 the Hearst Corporation gave Hearst Castle to the State of California, and the Department of Parks and Recreation runs it as a historic house museum. Hearst had said as early as 1927: “I see no reason why the ranch should not be a museum of the best things that I can secure.”