Carved and Gilded Rococo Double Doors

This pair of double doors (only one set shown here) and another pair just like them originally adorned the Golden Gallery in the Palazzo Carrega-Cataldi, now the Chamber of Commerce in Genoa. Architect Stanford White purchased them in Italy and brought to New York in the 1890s. One pair, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Rogers Fund, 1991.307a, b), stayed with White until his death in 1906. The Rough Point pair were destined for the ballroom of the Fifth Avenue mansion of William C. Whitney, which White was renovating at the time. Doris Duke bought the doors at the sale of the contents of another Newport mansion, Bois Dore, in 1977. Just as they were used in the Whitney Mansion, Duke used the doors in Rough Point as freestanding screens. One thing she changed, however, was the orientation of the hinges, leaving one pair of doors (the pair you see here) misaligned.