NEWPORT, RI.- The Preservation Society of Newport County announces “Wild Imagination: Art and Animals in the Gilded Age.” On view at Rosecliff from August 30, 2024 through January 12, 2025, the exhibition explores the changing place of animals in the Gilded Age (1865-1914): a period that forever transformed how we view and treat the animal world.



The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a watershed in human-animal relations. As the United States rapidly industrialized and urbanized, many Americans moved away from farms and villages, losing touch with the rural way of life and the closeness to nature—and animals—that defined it. These years also saw the rise of the animal welfare movement, an explosion in pet ownership and pet breeding, the popularization of natural scientific pursuits like birding, and Americans’ encounters with “exotic” species in new spaces of deep-sea exploration, colonization, and empire-building.



Residents of Newport and greater Rhode Island played a vital, if sometimes contradictory role, in these developments. They advocated at the vanguard of the animal protection movement yet also set the era’s fashions in furs and feathers. They performed groundbreaking zoological research, bred dogs, and raced horses. They built the first private menagerie for admiring live animals in the US, yet also expanded industries like the railroads and coal mining that hastened the destruction of animal habitats.



Visitors will have the opportunity to see over 100 works on display across a range of media, from paintings, ceramics, furniture, and watercolors, to fancy dog collars and sea creatures made out of glass. “Wild Imagination” is the first major presentation to consider how the Gilded Age shaped our modern relationship with animals with a focus on local Newport history.



Exhibited works are drawn from the Newport mansions with additional loans from local partners at the Newport Historical Society, the Newport Restoration Foundation, the National Museum of American Illustration, Brown University, Castle Hill Inn, and the Museum at the International Tennis Hall of Fame.



Additional objects were generously loaned by Historic New England, Harvard University, the New-York Historical Society, New York University, Edith Wharton’s home The Mount, Trinity College, Maryhill Museum of Art, Maymont Estate, Mystic Seaport Museum, and the Columbus Museum of Art.



To learn more about “Wild Imagination: Art and Animals in the Gilded Age,” please visit www.NewportMansions.org/events.