Circled on this publicity still for the acclaimed American television drama series The Gilded Age is a Minton cup and saucer supplied by Cotswold Antiques. In late 2020, we shipped a ‘Minton fluted teaset with turquoise cabuchons‘ to the property department of The Gilded Age at an address in Brooklyn, New York. The series has since proved so popular that Home Box Office announced a fourth season of The Gilded Age will air in 2025.

The Gilded Age is set in New York in the 1880s as a surge in industrialisation gave rise to an explosion of wealth. It chronicles the conflicts in New York high society between nouveaux riche upstarts and Old Money families, some of whom claimed descent from the ‘knickerbocker aristocracy’ of early Dutch settlers. The Gilded Age was created and written for HBO by Julian Fellowes, who is also the author of its British forerunner, Downton Abbey.

The photograph, by Alison Cohen Rosa for HBO, shows ‘Sylvia Chamberlain’ seated in her drawing room beside a table, on which one of the Minton cups can be seen, next to a vase and figurine.

‘Mrs. Chamberlain’, played by Jeanne Tripplehorn, is married to one of a new breed of wealthy industrialists who funds her impressive collection of French art. ‘Sylvia’ has a scandalous past. She is rumoured to have been the mistress of ‘Augustus Chamberlain’ before the death of his first wife, and their son, whom they claim to have adopted, was clearly born out of wedlock.

Like many characters in The Gilded Age, she is based on a real-life counterpart. Arabella Worsham Huntington rose from a poor, fatherless home in Alabama to become the richest woman in America.

Arabella was nine years old when her mother opened a boarding house in Richmond, Virginia, to support her nine children. Among the neighbourhood hotels and other lodgings were brothels, gambling dens and slave auctions.

Arabella later became the mistress of John Archer Worsham, owner of a faro gambling house. At some point, she also caught the eye of Collis Potter Huntington, a self-made railway magnate who started out as an itinerant peddler, then provisioner to miners during the California Gold Rush. He was 32 years Arabella’s senior.

The Confederate capital fell in 1865 and was left devastated. To escape poverty in the South in the wake of the Civil War, Worsham decided they should move to New York. Arabella was 19 and pregnant. Worsham’s attempt to relaunch his gambling business was a failure, and after a year of living together in New York, he returned to his legal wife in Richmond, leaving Arabella in New York.

For the sake of propriety, Arabella claimed to be married and was using the surname Worsham. She pretended Worsham had died. The son she bore in 1870 was also called Archer Milton Worsham, although he closely resembled Huntington.

With Worsham out of the way, Huntington installed his “widowed” mistress and her infant son in a succession of fine New York homes, including one at 54th Street. With financial support from her rich paramour, Belle was able to forge a new identity as a sophisticated connoisseur, spending eye-watering sums on fine art, furnishings and jewellery.

Huntington’s first wife died of cancer in 1884. Nine months later, he married Arabella. He was 62, she was 34. Archer, who was in all likelihood his biological offspring, was legally adopted as his son. The newlyweds eventually moved to what was described as an ‘Italian palace,’ built according to Arabella’s specifications, at the corner of 57th Street and Fifth Avenue, where jewellers Tiffany stands today. Thanks to the snobbery of the Vanderbilts and Astors they were still excluded from New York high society.

Arabella inherited two-thirds of Huntington’s estate when he died in 1900. His favourite nephew, Henry Huntington, received the rest.

Henry Huntington was infatuated with Arabella. Shortly after his uncle’s death, he separated from his wife and moved into the Metropolitan Club to be near Arabella’s New York mansion. Soon after his divorce was finalised in 1906, he proposed marriage, but Arabella kept him waiting seven years, by which time she had reached the age of 63.

Henry Huntingdon owned the Pacific Electric Railway in Southern California and built a palatial villa on an estate at San Marino, nowadays a suburb of Los Angeles. He shared Arabella’s tastes in art, and the villa housed a remarkable collection of European paintings, sculpture and fine furnishings. In the 1920s, Henry indulged a particular passion for rare books and manuscripts. After Arabella’s death in 1924, he devoted the last three years of his life to building an art gallery at San Marino in memory of his wife. In 1927 the library, art gallery and botanical gardens at San Marino were bequeathed to the public.

Not long after her wedding in 1900 to Collis Huntington, Arabella sold her furnished house on 54th Street in New York to John D. Rockefeller, Sr. The only change he made to the Gilded Age interiors was to replace the carpets. Following Rockefeller’s death in 1937, his son demolished the building to make way for the construction of the Museum of Modern Art. MoMA’s famed sculpture garden is where the mansion once stood. John D. Rockefeller Jr. fortunately saved three of Arabella’s rooms. He donated her Moorish smoking room to the Brooklyn Museum, where it is known as the ‘Worsham-Rockefeller Room’ (click here) while her dressing room and bedroom boudoir were given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The dressing room has remained at the Met (click here), but in 2008, the bedroom was given to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (click here and here).

The Sleepy Hollow Country Club was used for filming Sylvia Chamberlain’s drawing room in The Gilded Age. The country club lies in the valley of the Pocantico River, a tributary of the Hudson in Upstate New York. In the 17th Century, the Dutch referred to the Pocantico as Slapershaven (‘Sleepers’ Haven’) and over time the valley became known in English as Sleepy Hollow. As a teenager, Washington Irvine lived in nearby Tarrytown and made the valley the setting for his popular short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, written in 1820.

The clubhouse at Sleepy Hollow Country Club was once a private residence called Woodlea. Built in 1892-95, it was one of the largest privately owned houses in the United States. The Italianate villa and 250-acre estate were bought by Frank Vanderlip and William Rockefeller in 1910. In the following year, the property was incorporated as a country club. The founding directors included John Jacob Astor IV (who would die in 1913 aboard the Titanic), W. Averell Harriman and Cornelius Vanderbilt III.

For filming The Gilded Age, the former parlour at Woodlea was furnished in rococo style.