Rosecliff, the Gilded Age mansion in Newport, is now open to the public as a historic house museum. The house has also been known as the Hermann Oelrichs House and the J. Edgar Monroe House. It was built in 1898–1902 by Theresa Fair Oelrichs, a silver heiress from Nevada whose father, James Graham Fair, was one of the four partners in the Comstock Lode.
Theresa was the wife of Hermann Oelrichs, the American agent for the Norddeutscher Lloyd steamship line. She and her husband, together with her sister Virginia Fair, bought this land in 1891 from the estate of George Bancroft and commissioned the celebrated architectural firm McKim, Mead, and White to design a summer home suitable for entertaining on a grand scale. The principal architect, Stanford White, modeled Rosecliff after the Grand Trianon of Versailles but smaller and reduced to a basic "H" shape, while keeping Mansart's scheme of a glazed arcade of arched windows.
With little opportunity to channel her energy elsewhere, she "threw herself into the social scene with tremendous gusto," becoming, with Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish and Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont of nearby Belcourt, one of the three great hostesses of Newport. Notice the glazed arcade of arched windows on the façade waiting before you.