The Breakers is a Gilded Age mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, with a kitchen full of copper.
The house is magnificent. It is open to the public and draws thousands of visitors a year who are eager to experience its lovingly preserved interiors. Among the gorgeous rooms is a large and airy kitchen with a collection of copper pots arranged around the room and hanging from a multi-tiered central rack. The photo below, taken by VFC reader Amy Levesque, shows the kitchen as displayed during the holiday season.
Naturally, I was drawn to this display. If this collection is intended to be historically accurate, I would expect these to be American in make, or perhaps French given the Francophilia of the wealthy American families of the period. Another VFC reader shared some close-up photos of the copper that enable us to see more details. Let’s explore the history of this lovely house and then take a closer look at the copper.
The history
The town of Newport in the East Coast state of Rhode Island was the premier summer sailing and social resort for wealthy U.S. families in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Cliff Walk runs along the southeastern shore of the town and offers a glorious view out over the Atlantic and, on the landward side, a series of beautiful Gilded Age mansions one after another like a string of pearls. Of these, “The Breakers” on the prominence of Ochre Point is universally acknowledged as the most splendid.
The house that we know today is the second grand residence built at the site. In 1877, Pierre Lorillard IV (1833-1901) began purchasing parcels of land with an ideal aspect looking out onto the ocean, ultimately assembling 12.5 acres. He commissioned Boston architects Peabody & Stern to design and build “The Breakers,” a lavish Queen Anne style mansion. (The Lorillard tobacco company named its “Newport” brand of cigarettes for the town.) The illustration below was produced just after construction was completed in 1878.
By 1883, this lovely home was recognized as the most lavish “cottage” in Newport. Perhaps its splendor is what drew the eye of Cornelius Vanderbilt II (1843-1899), scion of the Vanderbilt family, which had grown extremely wealthy from the steamship trade in the 18th century and, in the 19th, a strategic realignment to the burgeoning U.S. railway industry. Pierre Lorillard had come to find The Breakers too distant from his beloved racetracks and decided to sell the property, prompting a bidding war. In 1885 Cornelius bought the house and land for US$400,000 (US$9.75 million in 2024 dollars), outbidding a competing buyer who had offered US$375,000 just a week prior.
However, the Vanderbilts’ enjoyment of their new estate would be short-lived. On November 25th, 1892, at about 4:00 pm, a fire broke out in the kitchen in the basement level under the main hall of the house. The flames quickly spread upwards through the brick ground floor to the upper levels, which were constructed of wood. Cornelius, his wife, their four children, and the household servants escaped without harm, but The Breakers, built just 14 years previously, was completely destroyed with all its contents. Despite suffering an estimated loss of $700,000, of which less than half was insured, Cornelius decided to rebuild immediately. The new residence would retain the name The Breakers but would be larger, grander, and most importantly, as fireproof as Vanderbilt money could make it.
To accomplish this monumental task, Cornelius chose Richard Morris Hunt, a prominent Paris-educated Beaux Arts architect who had built multiple residences in New York City for the Vanderbilt family as well as Marble House, another Newport “cottage” for William Kissam Vanderbilt just a half-mile south along the Cliff Walk, and The Biltmore Estate, an enormous private estate in Asheville, North Carolina for George Washington Vanderbilt II. Construction of the new edifice began in 1893 at a cost estimated at US$2 million (approximately US$75 million in 2024); with its furnishings, the total value of The Breakers would be estimated $7 million (about US$240 million in 2024).
The house was completed in just over two years, which, considering its scale and complexity, was a miracle for its time. According to the property’s 1994 application to the U.S. National Parks Service for entry into the historical register,
The method of construction used by Hunt was revolutionary to contemporary architectural and engineering practice. Hunt employed an approach to building construction which he termed the “Critical Path Method,” whereby all elements that could be produced independent of each other were constructed simultaneously. In this way, such items as the plate glass windows and doors, hardware, and terra cotta roof tiles of The Breakers were produced in the most efficient manner. This required an incredible degree of foresight and precise planning on the part of the architect and only Hunt’s virtuosity in his field allowed him to execute such an approach without flaw. By using the “Critical Path Method,” Hunt was able to construct The Breakers in 27 months, an accomplishment that astonished his peers and awed the public.
The result was spectacular. Hunt was a celebrated architect working at the pinnacle of a long career, and he drew upon his education at the school of architecture at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris (where he assisted in the renovation of the Louvre) to incorporate the most beautiful elements of European design. The Breakers was constructed of steel trusses and masonry with façades modeled on the northern Italian palazzi of Genoa; the sequence of photos below, from Hunt’s personal collection and taken likely just after construction was completed in 1895, provides a sort of tour around the exterior, starting from the entryway and walking around to the right around the southern and eastern aspects.
The schematic below, dated January 1893 and also from Hunt’s collection, represents the floorplan of the ground floor.
Note that for all its perfection of design, the building is not symmetrical: an L-shaped wing projects from the left side of the front façade and contains the kitchen, servants’ hall, and pantry. This was a deviation from conventional great house design, which preferred to tuck these facilities in a basement level away from the living spaces. According to the 1994 historical registry application for The Breakers, this quirk was quite deliberate:
The Kitchen of The Breakers is unique because it is located on the first floor, not in the basement as it was in other houses of the period. This was because the Vanderbilts desired The Breakers to be as fireproof as possible and so the kitchen was designed as a separate wing. The room was also well ventilated which was beneficial for the staff.
One can almost hear Cornelius Vanderbilt’s voice demanding that he never again suffer an errant ember to bring down the entire structure.
But for all this exquisite planning and expense, Cornelius’s enjoyment of The Breakers would be, once again, short-lived: he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1896 at age 53 and died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1899. His wife Alice continued to use and enjoy The Breakers until her death at age 88 in 1935. Ownership of The Breakers then passed to her daughter Countess Gladys Vanderbilt Széchenyi, who had married the Hungarian Count László Széchenyi in 1908. In 1948, Gladys leased The Breakers to the newly-created Preservation Society of Newport County as a public museum for $1 a year on the condition that the third floor be maintained as a private family space. Gladys passed away in 1965 and ownership of The Breakers passed to her daughter Sylvia. She decided in 1972 to sell the property outright to the Preservation Society while retaining life tenancy in the third floor. Sylvia passed away in 1995 but her family continued to use the third floor as a private space until 2018.
The kitchen
As noted above, the kitchen of The Breakers is set on the ground floor in a wing set away from the main body of the house. According to the 1994 historical registry application,
The room retains all of its original features and serves as a well-planned example of a turn-of-the-century kitchen complex. In the kitchen there is a French style wood and coal burning stove below which are three ovens. At the far end of the kitchen is the coal bin as well as two broilers with a rotisserie for turning meat on a spit. There is also a work table covered with zinc which served the same purpose as stainless steel today. On the table is a marble mortar used to crush herbs. In the far corner is an ice chest which originally contained ice cut from local ponds in the winter. Another dumbwaiter on the east wall brought the ice and supplies up to the kitchen from the basement where it was stored in large walk-in iceboxes.
Most crucially for our interests is this bombshell:
Although the original copper pots were donated by Countess Szechenyi to the scrap metal drive during World War II, they have since been replaced by other similar pots donated by other Newport families whose homes are of the same period.
A worthy donation, to be sure, but at the same time, what a loss. I have been unable to verify the fact of this donation with period sources but I do not question it. Gladys Vanderbilt Széchenyi knew the horrors of war; she endured four years trapped in Hungary during World War I and spoke affectingly of the deprivation and starvation inflicted most devastatingly on the country’s children. During World War II, she was living safely in the United States, but her husband Count Széchenyi’s estates in Hungary were seized by occupying forces. Scrap metal drives were common in Europe and the United States during wartime to collect raw materials for munitions, and historical records show that for its part, the Vanderbilt estate in New York donated 2,800 pounds of copper that I do not doubt was composed of copper cookware. I find it easy to believe that Gladys would have willingly made this same sacrifice.
For our purposes, then, we should consider the collection of copper cookware at The Breakers as a historical recreation. The 1971 photo below, perhaps taken as prelude to the sale to the Preservation Society in 1972, shows this assemblage of lids, pans, and pots. I expect the original collection was much larger — intact collections at other large houses and palaces show racks upon racks of pieces that would be necessary to support enormous events — but these gifts to The Breakers go a long way to restoring the character of the room. What I’d like to explore during the rest of this post is their historical accuracy.
The place I’d like to start this examination is, ironically, not with the copper but rather with the giant cast iron stove that runs along one side of the wall. This edifice is original to the 1895-era kitchen and as such provides a useful milestone. Thanks to a sharp-eyed VFC reader, we have a close-up photo of the badge: “Duparquet, Huot & Moneuse, New York, Chicago, Boston.” I did a bit of research into DH&M for Bryan’s lovely Duparquet saucepan but I am happy to report I have uncovered more complete information about the firm’s history.
Elie Theodore Moneuse (1825-1887) was born in Valenciennes, France. According to New York, The Metropolis, published 1893, he immigrated to New York in 1852 and started a small stove-making business “in a basement on West Broadway.” (The 1854-1855 directory of New York industry lists Elie Moneuse as a tinsmith at 111 & 113 West Broadway.) The business initially struggled: “When Mr. Moneuse first began business he was glad when he got an opportunity to work off a few bundles of iron a month.” However, Elie had an early stroke of luck: in 1852, his first year in business, Moneuse sold his first French-style range to the famous Swiss-Italian chef Lorenzo Delmonico. In 1853, Elie’s “school and class mate in France” Louis Francois Duparquet (1826-1887?) joined him in New York — some say Elie summoned him — and the two men went into business together. By 1873 they had created a successful venture as “the largest suppliers of Hotel kitchen ranges and furnishings in the United States.”
Then came change, and rupture. In 1870, Louis Duparquet’s daughter Adèle married a young man named Pierre Huot, and Louis sought to insert his new son-in-law into the firm. According to the absolutely marvelous article “To Feed the Multitudes” in the January 1935 edition of Fortune magazine, “a squabble ensued, Moneuse moved out and started all over by himself, and the old friends competed hotly with each other.” Elie Moneuse formed his own warehouse and foundry, whereas Duparquet & Huot continued at 43 & 45 Wooster and in 1881 shifted down the street to 24 & 26 Wooster. (This explains why one can find catalogs for “Duparquet & Huot” during the 1870s and 1880s.)
However, after Louis Duparquet and Elie Moneuse passed away circa 1887, the surviving members of the two companies — Elie’s son Elie Jerome Moneuse (1861-1941) and Duparquet’s two brothers — realized that “in union there is strength,” as New York, The Metropolis put it. Thus was formed Duparquet, Huot & Moneuse Co., posthumously reuniting the two men. By 1889, DH&M Co. returned to 43 & 45 Wooster Street and circa 1917 moved to 110 West 22nd Street.
During its heyday, DH&M was the preferred provider to the greatest hotels, restaurants, and residences of the world, with a specialty in kitchen design and outfitting for high-end private clients. According to Fortune, writing in 1935,
Greatest was the “brownstone block” of the Vanderbilt family clustered about old William H. Vanderbilt — he and his daughters, Mrs. W. D. Sloane and Mrs. Eliot F. Shepard, on Fifth Avenue between Fifty-first and Fifty-second streets; his son, William K., and grandson, William K. Jr., at Fifty-second Street; his two other daughters, Mrs. H. McK. Twombly and Mrs. Seward Webb, at Fifty-fourth Streets; and his other son, Cornelius, on Fifty-seventh. Duparquet did them all. A special red-letter day in its private-client history was when the grandiose and social-minded William K. (whose house [Marble House in Newport] had just been designed by the great architect Richard Morris Hunt) ordered Duparquet fixtures. For it was on these ranges that the first prima-donna chef imported by an American private family was to operate: that was Delenne, nicknamed “the $10,000 beauty” because of his unprecedented and notorious salary.
I must pick a slight nit here: “The $10,000 beauty” was not “Delenne” but in fact Joseph Dugniol (1851-1901). He was born in England to French parents and worked his way from waiter to chef in Paris, Vienna, and Berlin. It was there that Dugniol served a sublime and fateful meal to William K. Vanderbilt. Sources differ as to the dish in question: some say it was Canard sauvage, sauce au sang of which Dugniol’s flamboyant presentation was particularly celebrated; some say it was a pommes de terre à la Georgette that particularly delighted William’s wife Alva; still others say it was a simple roast quail that Dugniol repeated with perfection over five successive evenings. Whatever it was, William K. was so taken with Dugniol’s skill as chef that he offered him a job on the spot for $10,000 a year. Dugniol arrived in New York in March 1888 accompanied by his wife (and her piano), his sous-chef M. Watrin, and his pastry chef M. Delanne (likely the origin of “Delenne”). Despite his princely compensation, Dugniol stayed with the Vanderbilts for only a year: “This relationship swiftly became fractious – Dugniol scathingly remarked that the Vanderbilts ate, they did not dine, and referred the boss to the gardener when he requested boiled beef and cabbage.” In 1889 Dugniol returned to Europe, where his complaints about the lack of refinement of his American employer would presumably only burnish his culinary reputation, and eventually opened his own restaurant in Paris. He passed away in 1902 but his legacy as a celebrity chef to the richest family in the world lives on.
But I digress.
Duparquet did kitchens also for John Jacob Astor, William Rockefeller, August Belmont, Eldridge Gerry, Edward Cooper, Robert Goelet, C. Oliver Iselin, Jay Gould, Theodore Havemeyer, Levi P. Morton, and on and on. And if you think these names are mere dim recollections to George P. Ahner [who was DH&M President in 1935] and the other older men in Duparquet, you don’t understand Duparquet. They are not names, they are ever present ghosts. Mr. Ahner loves to sit at his desk and pass his hand over his brow and list the genealogies of the Victorian great, to repeat affectionately their names, and chronicle their great repasts.
Ghosts, indeed. In 1937, just two years after those words were written, DH&M was sold to Nathan Straus & Sons, a competing restaurant design and supply firm specializing in china, flatware, and glassware. Straus & Duparquet continued for another thirty years — one can find vintage china with a “Straus-Duparquet” stamp, but to my knowledge, no more copper — before declaring bankruptcy and closing its doors in 1965.
Just as The Breakers is a monument to Gilded Age grandeur long gone, so too is the iron stove in its kitchen a representation of DH&M at the peak of its fortunes in the 1890s.
Large stoves like this one, which stretches about 21 feet (6.4 meters), were made up of multiple functional units. The doors, handles, and levers across the façade show that this one consists of five units: left to right, there are two grill units, three oven units, and an end unit with a hinged lid.
At the left end are two grill units with plate warming cabinets below. The left-side unit is a rotisserie grill with a mechanical rotating spit; the upper door panel is hinged at the top to allow the grill to swing down into a horizontal position. The right-side unit is a broiler with a sliding grill and a panel door that could be lowered to intensify the heat. Both of these would be heated by wood coals or charcoal laid directly on the clay tiles below the grill.
Moving to the right are the three modular stove units, each likely around 48 inches (122 cm) wide, with an oven and surface cooking hobs. Multiple online sources assert that the entire stove was heated at once but I do not believe that is correct. Each stove unit has its own foyer, an interior compartment to burn coal to generate heat, located beneath the left-side cooking hob. The foyer was accessible from above for fueling by lifting away the hob plates. Radiant heat and hot air from the foyer flowed around the oven compartment to the right and exited via the chimney to the rear. The temperature of each unit’s oven and hobs could be adjusted somewhat by controlling air flow with the half-moon shaped panel on the ash tray below the foyer or by turning a valve on the chimney. While convection and conduction would certainly spread heat from one oven unit to another through the body of the stove, a skilled chef would know how to set up different temperatures in the oven compartments and surface hobs as needed for the meal. (For much more on the inner workings of a stove of this type, please see Monet’s stove.)
The dial-like levers on the front and the words “Patented June 1, 1880” indicate the presence of Elie Moneuse’s “revolving fire-grate,” a mechanism to agitate the grate of the foyer to shake ashes into the ash tray below without requiring direct access to the foyer chamber. This patent was issued to Elie during the period of his estrangement from Louis Duparquet, and no doubt the reunited DH&M eagerly incorporated this technology into their stove designs after 1889.
At the far right end is a unit with a flat hinged lid on the top surface concealing a square compartment and, on the front façade, a small sliding door mounted on tracks behind which is another foyer. The 1994 historical application calls this a “coal bin” and the hinged lid is sometimes shown open and the compartment filled with coal, but I do not think this is correct. Why would dirty coal be stored in such a prominent location, right next to the food? And if this is a coal storage bin, what is the purpose of the foyer just below it? With its front-opening door, this unit’s foyer seems unlikely to me to be intended to burn coal. Coal was an expensive fuel that provided intense, steady, and long-lasting heat; the coal-burning foyers beneath the surface hobs of the main stove units would need to be fed relatively infrequently, which was why it was acceptable that they were so inconvenient to access. I don’t think the foyer of this end unit is fueled by coal but instead by wood or charcoal, which burn more quickly and require easier access via a façade-mounted door for more frequent refueling. (This unit also does not have its own chimney, which suggests to me that the emissions were less noxious than coal fumes and could be adequately handled by the large overhead hood.)
My hypothesis is that this end unit is not a coal bin at all but instead a vegetable steamer. At right is an imperfect example — it’s from the 1883 catalog for Duparquet & Huot, so it’s a little early, and it also doesn’t have its own foyer — but that distinctive flat hinged lid is the defining characteristic of this functional unit. Another common element between this example and the unit at The Breakers is that both have a small handle on the lid that is not heat-proof, suggesting that the lid does not receive direct heat. The handle on the lid of the unit at The Breakers is inset so that it doesn’t protrude above the lid surface, which suggests to me that the unit served as an additional flat work surface when the steamer was not in use. I can’t find photos of the interior of the compartment but if my hypothesis is correct it would be watertight, several inches deep, and possibly have a tray or platform a few inches above its floor.
Of course, I make this speculation without seeing the unit myself, and I would welcome a more informed assessment. (I did email some questions about the kitchen’s copper to the docents at The Breakers but received no response.) If any readers have better information, please let me know.
And with that, our tour of the stove is complete.
And now, finally, the copper
I’d like to start with this stockpot, one of two often positioned on the stovetop. Thanks to the keen eye and quick thinking of our intrepid VFC reader, we have a very clear image of the stamp: “DH&M Co 43 & 45 Wooster Street NY.” This corresponds to the company’s location from 1889 to 1917 and is quite consistent with a pot that would have been purchased circa 1895 when The Breakers was constructed.
Make a note of the American handles. The side handles are of iron formed in an inverted U shape and attached with four small rivets. The lid handle is also a simple iron rod with the ends flattened into brackets fastened with a single rivet. (As noted exhaustively elsewhere on this site, a French stockpot of this period would be fitted with cast brass handles with a much more elaborate decorative design.) I don’t have enough detail to discern for certain, but I suspect that while these handles look like they could be forged (that is, hammered into shape) they are instead cast iron resembling a forged style.
As our second example, let’s look at the beautiful hammered lid below, which also carries a DH&M stamp for 43 & 45 Wooster. For a relatively simple object — a disk of copper attached to stick-like handle — this lid is a gorgeous piece of work. It has a lovely pattern of martelage across the surface and a deep inset around the rim that will create a nice seal against the pot. The shape of the handle where it attaches to the flat lid is quite distinctive with its rounded lobes; the texture of the iron looks cast to me, but as with the stockpot lid handle above, the shape of the casting seems to recall an earlier forged form. (Keep these pseudo-primitive shapes in mind as we continue on.)
Below is a close-up photo of another example of that tri-lobed lid handle on a lid stamped for DH&M. (The owner’s mark S.F. is also on the hanging lid above.)
The photo below gives an excellent view of the large saucepan in the foreground. Take a good look at the pan’s handle: the baseplate recalls the rounded lozenge French shape but is more rectangular, and the rivets are set in a horizontal plane. The hanging loop is a teardrop shape also quite similar to the French aesthetic.
What I am seeing here is “close but not quite French” — similar to several unstamped (but certainly French) examples I saw in Claude Monet’s copper cookware in the kitchen at Giverny. I wasn’t able to identify Monet’s pieces but taken together, and with confidence that the collection was assembled between 1880 and 1910 or so and remains original to the house, I came to call them “proto-French” designs representing the work of smaller chaudronneries that died out, so to speak, around the turn of the 20th century. I am coming to suspect that something similar happened with DH&M: Its founders Elie Moneuse and Louis Duparquet were born in France and came to the United States for the express purpose of offering French-style equipment to restaurants. My hypothesis is that they brought with them the proto-French cookware aesthetic as well, recreated with American tools and molds expressly to evoke its origins. I cannot prove this, of course, but I find the idea intriguing.
That saucepan also has an interesting stamp on it. I suspect it is a match to that on a piece recently sold by the Etsy seller Big Copper Kitchen, who claimed that this was the stamp of Elie Moneuse. I agree: Elie operated his own kitchen supply company while he was on the outs with Louis Duparquet from about 1873-1897 or so, and a historical document dated 1883 lists “128 South 5th Avenue” as the business address. This large saucepan is perfectly appropriate for The Breakers, and congratulations to the lucky buyer who has its sibling.
The hanging rack above the central work island is a marvel. I see multiple additional lids with the pseudo-primitive tri-lobed stick handle, but also a French handle on the lid hanging second from left next to the sauce pan. I can’t quite make out the maker’s mark — it is a two-line text mark — but it is definitely not a DH&M stamp. (Could it be a two-line Dehillerin stamp that I have tentatively dated to 1890-1910?) I suspect the sauté pan hanging directly below it is also French — something about the pan’s handle baseplate looks more “pillowy” than the DH&M version. It’s hard to tell from this photo but it could be that that sauté pan is the mate to the lid under which it hangs, further suggesting they are both French.
The photo below shows a few more pieces, including a nice oval daubière. Looking at this hanging rack, I have a renewed appreciation for the old practice of stamping numbers into lids and pans to match them.
I’m pulling in a few more photos from other sources that provide more views. I see more French lids hanging towards the right end of the hanging rack in the photo below.
It’s challenging to identify and date this copper based on photos, but from what I can see, the collection appears to be era-appropriate. The DH&M stamped pieces are likely as close as possible to the vanished original set. The E&M piece is a rare one and also quite correct. I’d have to see the actual stamps, if any, on the French pieces, but they look correct in style as well.
This collection has earned the VFC Stamp (heh) of Approval, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this post as much as I enjoyed researching it. Have you visited The Breakers? Do you have better close-up photos of the copper? Did the tour leaders provide more information on the kitchen and its copper? I’d love to learn more.
When I received an email from VFC today during a long bike ride, pointing to a new post, I almost couldn’t believe it after this long break from publications. Although I couldn’t wait to read the article, I didn’t want to do so on my smartphone. So I’ll postpone that indulgence until my return. But even now, I would like to thank VFC for what is certainly another excellent piece of work.
Martin, I hope you enjoy the post!
A great report on this extraordinary property, its history and its cuisine. I had to read some passages several times to absorb all the details. The size and equipment of the kitchen are certainly comparable with castle kitchens in Europe. I was surprised that even in the US, copperware had to be melted down for the needs of the war. Although the gaps that this sacrifice left in the kitchen of the house could not be completely filled, the donors did their best to provide historically appropriate replacements. As a European, I am particularly pleased that a bridge was built between our continents and cultures through the manufacturers of the copperware. Thank you very much for this wonderful contribution!
Incidentally, separate bakeries were common in villages and towns in many regions of the world for a long time. On the one hand to counter the risk of fire and on the other to save energy costs by baking bread together. I know of a bread bakery in South Tyrol where hundreds of loaves of bread were baked together only two or three times a year. This bread was then dried and could be kept for months. Even mountaineering expeditions have been equipped with this nutritious and long-lasting bread.
I felt the same way. I even thought for a moment whether it was a fake message (unfortunately I get them from time to time). Thank God I was then able to quickly recognize that it was genuine.
What a well researched article, as we have come to expect from VFC! In a sense, a continuation/extension of the article on the Monet kitchen. Beautiful!
Many thanks for that!
Thank you, Gerhard!
I read and old post regarding a heavy French saute pan, with double stamp. I have one. My father got it from an old restaurant in Oslo, Norway. It was used in the kitchen of hotel Bristol. The initial is H and a number 26.
Best regards
Lise
Thank you VFC for another great post on a fabulous kitchen. I really admire your meticulous investigation evident in your posts. It was great to see another post on your site after a long break!