San Simeon's collection of ceremonial objects

Magazine Antiques, April, 2002 by Victoria Kastner, Jana Seely

La Cuesta Encantada (the enchanted hill), William Randolph Hearst's Mediterranean style estate in San Simeon, California (see Pl. IV), provides a dramatic setting for a wide-ranging collection of architectural antiques and fine and decorative arts. Although the public has long called the place "Hearst Castle," a name derived from its romantic hilltop site, the complex is nothing like a fortress in purpose or mood. Hearst's architect, Julia Morgan, collaborated with her client from 1919 to 1947 to create a group of buildings whose exteriors emulate those of a southern European hill town, and whose interiors echo the American country house tradition.

The central structure is the 115-room, four-story Casa Grande, which plays the role of a cathedral at the highest point of the 1,600-foot peak. Three smaller houses surround its front facade at a slightly lower elevation -- Casa del Mar, Casa del Sol, and Casa del Monte, named for their respective views of the ocean, sunset, and mountains. They resemble villas surrounding a hilltop church. Two classically inspired swimming pools are located farther down the terraced landscape, like ancient Roman ruins at the outskirts of a town.

Popular legend, which owes much to the fictional portrayal of Hearst's art collecting in the film Citizen Kane (1941), holds that years before he began construction Hearst squirreled away thousands of objects with which to decorate the estate. (1) Orson Welles (1915-1985) casts La Cuesta Encantada as Xanadu; a dark and deserted jumble of cavernous rooms filled with meaningless junk. Nothing could be further from the truth. San Simeon is the considered and highly personal creation of Hearst and Morgan, who employed no decorators, and together determined every aspect of the design. The historian John Julius Norwich wrote of the estate recently:

Remembering that William Randolph Hearst was the model for Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, we would expect his vast mansion to be dark, gloomy, and not a little vulgar, but we would be wrong.... The house is undeniably a hotch-potch, in which French tapestries rub shoulders with Dutch pictures, English furniture, Spanish tilework and heaven knows what else; but the quality of everything is so superb, and the blending with the surrounding architecture so confident and assured, that one cannot find it in one's heart to criticize. I went prepared to mock; I remained to marvel. (2)

Hearst was a lifelong collector. Even on his first trip to Europe in 1873, at the age of ten, when he spent eighteen months abroad, his mother, Phoebe Apperson Hearst (1842-1919), described him to her husband, George (1820- 1891), as "picture crazy.... he frequently surprises me in his expressions concerning the best pictures." Possessing objects, rather than merely admiring them, was always important to Hearst. In her letter Phoebe Hearst wrote that she found it difficult to convince Willie that "we could not buy all we saw. He gets so fascinated, his reason and judgment forsake him. I, too, acknowledge the temptation." (3) Hearst himself later joked to his mother about his propensity for buying things:

I have been in Munich for several days... and I have bought beer mugs for myself and beer mugs for presents until there are only a few left in town and they are retained by the shopkeepers as souvenirs. (4)

He confessed to her:

I have the art fever terribly. Queer, isn't it? I never thought I would get it this way. I never miss a gallery now and I go and mosey about the pictures and statuary and admire them and wish they were mine. My artistic longings are not altogether distinct from avarice, I am afraid. (5)

Hearst's passion for owning ancient Greek vases and Spanish and Italian objects lasted throughout his life, influenced at least in part by his great admiration for the grandiose structures and eclectic art collections of the architect Stanford White (1853-1906). Before his death in 1906, White in fact was one of a number of people who laid the groundwork for tariffs favorable to American buyers of European art. The Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act of 1909 mandated that any work of art over one hundred years old be exempt from duty. This advantageous situation for American collectors was soon made more attractive by rising estate taxes abroad and postwar Europe's need for capital to rebuild.

Hearst's purchases for San Simeon were nearly all made in the auction galleries and art dealers' showrooms of New York City, belying the myth that he did all his art buying abroad. Still he was an indirect beneficiary of the tariff act, since works of art poured into the United States in huge quantities after World War I.

Always oriented toward collecting single objects and an enthusiastic bargainer, Hearst frustrated dealers by making up his own mind rather than relying on their advice, and by collecting in a wide range of categories. In this respect he resembled European collectors from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century in contrast to most Americans, on whom art dealers exerted great influence. The art dealer Germain Seligman (1893-1978) wrote that Hearst