I had not paid any attention to Stephen and Christine Schwarzman’s Newport restoration project until my partner Bill Cohan reported on the big housewarming party the couple threw last week at Miramar, their newly refurbished 8-acre clifftop estate on Bellevue Avenue. As Bill suggested, the house is a bit of a head-scratcher for a couple who already have residences in Nantucket, East Hampton, Saint-Tropez, Jamaica, and an estate in the English countryside, not to mention a primary home on Park Avenue. Were they really giving up on the big billionaire summer redoubts in favor of sleepy, old-ish money Newport, as an article in Air Mail had originally suggested?
Probably not, so why the concerted publicity push? After reading Bill’s item on the christening of Miramar—which is just a little more than a mile walk away from the most famous house in Newport, the Vanderbilts’ old Breakers—I noticed some other suggestive stories about the party, the house (which the Schwarzmans bought for $27 million in 2021), and their decision to convert the house into a museum that will be open to the public after their deaths. A couple of the reports included quotes from Ian Wardropper, the outgoing director of the Frick Museum in New York, where Schwarzman is a trustee. “They are really taking this seriously,” Wardropper was quoted as saying in two different outlets, “and trying to get the very best objects they can find to make this house sing.”
Wardropper vouched for the quality of the Schwarzmans’ meticulous renovation of the house, which was designed in the French 18th century style and originally completed in 1915. That was three years after the death of its original owner, George D. Widener, who tragically went down with the Titanic while coming home from a trip to Europe to buy furnishings for the house. Widener, who never got the chance to live in Miramar, came from a wealthy Philadelphia family of art collectors. His father, P.A.B. Widener, who built his Gilded Age fortune on Civil War procurement contracts and invested in Philadelphia streetcars before eventually reaching full-fledged Robber Baron status, was a major art collector. His surviving son, Joseph Early Widener, also became an important collector. His 2,000-work donation was one of the founding gifts to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where most of the great collections of the day found their final resting place.
According to the art market people I spoke to, the Schwarzmans have staff helping with their own acquisitions, but have not worked with a particular art advisor. (Of course, a perk of being a Frick trustee is access to the museum’s expertise when you need it.) Among the pieces I’m told they have acquired are a Gobelins tapestry from the Audran workshop, for the dining room, (Gilded Age folk were mad about tapestries) and a late 18th century secretary desk from Versailles. The Schwarzmans also apparently bought paintings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Peter Lely, and John Singer Sargent.
That gives us some clue about what might be going on at Miramar. The mansions in Newport may be grandiose, but they don’t contain much in the way of important art or decorative arts. So the bar is pretty low here for Schwarzman—who has also been endearing himself to the locals by repairing damage to the popular Cliff Walk that runs by the bottom of his property—to stand out. The Schwarzmans are not art collectors in the usual sense of the term, although their $45 billion net worth means they surely buy art. (They’ve got a lot of homes to decorate, after all.) If their goal was to build something to rival the great American collectors like Frick, Barnes, and Getty, they would be starting fairly late in life.
Schwarzman likes to slap his name on things (like the New York Public Library). What I suspect he hopes to get out of sinking tens of millions of dollars into a home he’s not likely to spend more than a few nights a year in, located in a town where he’s never really spent any time, is explained in the museum being slated to be opened to the public some time in the not-too-distant future. In Newport, where the Vanderbilts’ Breakers is the town’s biggest tourist attraction, opening its doors to half a million visitors a year, Schwarzman can affiliate himself with the great fortunes of the Gilded Age and get better name recognition from all who come and see.
