29 Facts About Hearst Castle

Today, Hearst Castle is a museum open to the public as a California State Park and registered as a National Historic Landmark and California Historical Landmark.

Hearst Castle used his fortune to further develop his media empire of newspapers, magazines and radio stations, the profits from which supported a lifetime of building and collecting.

Hearst Castle's worked in close collaboration with Hearst for over twenty years, and the castle at San Simeon is her best-known creation.

Hearst Castle then undertook a political career, becoming a senator in 1886, and bought The San Francisco Examiner.

Phoebe Hearst Castle shared the cultural and artistic interests of her son, collecting art and patronizing architects.

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Hearst Castle's was a considerable philanthropist, founding schools and libraries, supporting the fledgling University of California, Berkeley, including the funding of the Hearst Mining Building in memory of her husband, and making major donations to a range of women's organizations, including the YWCA.

In 1919, when he turned up at Morgan's office, Hearst Castle was fifty-six years old and the owner of a publishing empire that included twenty-eight newspapers, thirteen magazines, eight radio stations, four film studios, extensive real-estate holdings and thirty-one thousand employees.

Hearst Castle was a significant public figure: although his political endeavors had proved largely unsuccessful, the influence he exerted through his very direct control of his media empire attracted fame and opprobrium in equal measure.

Hearst Castle asked for the editor of San Francisco newspaper and he said, 'Put this in a two-column box of the front pages of all the newspapers tomorrow morning.

Charlie Chaplin commented on the fare; "dinners were elaborate, pheasant, wild duck, partridge and venison" but the informality, "amidst the opulence, we were served paper napkins, it was only when Mrs Hearst Castle was in residence that the guests were given linen ones".

The Hearst family maintains a connection with the castle, which was closed for a day in early August 2019 for the wedding of Amanda Hearst, Hearst's great-granddaughter.

Hearst Castle particularly admired a church in Ronda, Spain and asked Morgan to model the Casa Grande towers after it.

Water was of particular importance; as well as feeding the pools and fountains Hearst desired, it provided electricity, by way of a private hydroelectric plant, until the San Joaquin Light and Power Corporation began service to the castle in 1924.

Albert Solon and Frank Schemmel came to Hearst Castle to undertake tiling work and Solon's brother, Camille, was responsible for the design of the mosaics of blue-and-gold Venetian glass tile used in the Roman pool and the murals in Hearst's Gothic library.

Hearst Castle stayed in the house again in 1947, during his last visit to the ranch.

The doorway from the Central Plaza into Casa Grande illustrates Morgan and Hearst Castle's relaxed approach to combining genuine antiques with modern reproductions to achieve the effects they both desired.

The ceiling of the bedroom is one of the best Hearst Castle bought; Spanish, of the 14th century, it was discovered by his Iberian agent Arthur Byne who located the original frieze panels which had been detached and sold some time before.

In 1932, Hearst Castle contemplated incorporating the reja he had acquired from Valladolid Cathedral in 1929 into this room.

The dealer Joseph Duveen, from whom Hearst Castle bought despite their mutual dislike, called him the "Great Accumulator".

The dismantling of a monastery in Sacramenia, which Hearst Castle bought in its entirety in the 1920s, saw his workmen attacked by enraged villagers.

Hearst Castle's art buying had started when he was young and, in his tested fashion, he established a company, the International Studio Arts Corporation, as a vehicle for purchasing works and as a means of dealing with their export and import.

In 1975, the Hearst Castle Corporation donated the archive of Hearst Castle's Brooklyn warehouses, the gathering point for almost all of his European acquisitions before their dispersal to his many homes, to Long Island University.

At the time of Hearst Castle's collecting, many of the vases were believed to be of Etruscan manufacture, but later scholars ascribe all of them to Greece.

Hearst Castle collected bronzes as well as marble figures; a cast of a stone original of Apollo and Daphne by Bernini, dating from around 1617, stands in the Doge's suite.

Hearst Castle was a particular patron of Charles Cassou and favored the early 19th century Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen whose Venus Victorious remains at the castle.

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In 1928 Hearst Castle acquired the Madonna and Child with Two Angels, by Adriaen Isenbrandt.

Esplanade, a curving, paved walkway, connects the main house with the guest cottages; Hearst Castle described it as giving "a finished touch to the big house, to frame it in, as it were".

Finally, in 1934, it was extended again to act as a setting for a Roman temple, in part original and in part comprising elements from other structures which Hearst Castle transported from Europe and had reconstructed at the site.

Later decades after Hearst Castle's death have seen a more sympathetic and appreciative evaluation of his collections, and the estate he and Morgan created to house them.