Founder
Doris
Duke

Doris Duke (1912-1993), philanthropist, collector, and preservationist, first came to Newport in 1915 at the age of three when her family began to summer here. Her parents, James B. and Nanaline Duke, would eventually buy Rough Point as a permanent summer home for the family. With James Duke’s death in 1925, Doris inherited the estate along with most of her father’s great fortune.

After the devastation of Hurricane Carol on Newport in 1954, Nanaline and Doris Duke decided to close Rough Point and the house was emptied of its contents. Although they began to entertain proposals for the long-term lease of the property, Doris ultimately decided instead to reopen Rough Point. In the summer and fall of 1957, she began to relocate most of the paintings, porcelain, furniture, and textiles from the family’s New York house to Newport. 

After re-establishing Rough Point as her home, Doris Duke became concerned about the future of Newport and the city’s earliest buildings. 18th-century houses along the historic Thames Street waterfront and Historic Hill neighborhoods were being demolished at a rapid pace to make way for widened roadways. As a counter-balance to these efforts, Duke founded the Newport Restoration Foundation in 1968, in an act that helped spur economic renewal and encouraged wider historic preservation efforts across the city. Under Duke’s leadership, NRF restored more than 100 18th- and early 19th-century buildings on Aquidneck Island. 

Duke’s approach to the historic fabric of Newport — to restore, maintain, and lease to tenant-stewards — was unusual in the field of historic preservation but not out of keeping with her long track record as a collector of fine and decorative arts, including architectural material, and a growing impulse at the time to make cultural heritage accessible to future generations. When she founded NRF in 1968, Doris had long been an art collector who had begun to consider her legacy and public responsibility:  

In 1964 she opened Duke Gardens, a series of greenhouses with an extensive and wide-ranging collection of plants from around the world, at Duke Farms, her home in Hillsborough, New Jersey. In 1965, she added a codicil to her will that would make her estate in Honolulu, Shangri La, a center for Islamic art and culture, open to the public and showcasing her life-time collection of Islamic art.  

And once she had settled back in Newport in the late 1950s, Duke began to add significant works of European fine and decorative arts to her parents’ collections, perhaps with the intention that Rough Point one day would also be opened to the public.