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# A Gilded Age Comes Home to Heritage House
- URL: https://www.raincrossgazette.com/a-gilded-age-comes-home-to-heritage-house/
- Published: 2026-08-24T11:59:25.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-24T11:59:24.000Z
- Description: New exhibit explores how Victorians filled their homes with art and meaning.
- Author: Museum of Riverside
- Tags: Museum Mondays

On September 11, 2026, Heritage House will reopen its doors for tours, programs, and events. Each season, the Museum of Riverside highlights an aspect of the Victorian age, connecting the past to the present through a different lens each time. In September, the focus will be on the wealth of art in this grand Victorian home. The Victorians are known for, well, “Victorian excess,” and the exhibition *Gilded: The Art of Heritage House* will examine how there came to be such a preference for a rich array of fine and decorative arts in the home.

*Gilded: The Art of Heritage House* will be on exhibit through November 29, 2026\. Throughout the exhibition, the Museum will offer special programs ranging from “Dying for Art,” which will focus on the alarming results of using some Victorian and pre-Victorian artists’ materials. Another will be “Write Like a Victorian,” which will encourage anyone to try their hand at writing an ornate “purple prose” style of opening line for a novel and recite it for all to enjoy. Visit the Museum of Riverside’s website for dates and details.

The backdrop of these programs will be the gilded, inlaid, tiled, flounced, carved, painted, and otherwise adorned furnishings that fill every corner of Heritage House, in the manner of most Victorian homes. The exhibition examines the moment in history that led to this explosion of décor, from the Industrial Revolution’s advances in manufacturing methods to the rise of a middle class with means to the colonial expansion of Queen Victoria’s Great Britain, which brought imports to Europe and the U.S. like never before.  

The Victorian age (1837-1901) is a study in contradictions, and its achievements and values continue to mark British and, by extension, American attitudes to this day. The period was one of rapid change and resistant conservatism, scientific advances and extremes of imagination, child labor and growing human rights—all of this existed simultaneously. It was fundamentally an optimistic age, and discoveries in every discipline nurtured a belief that nature was a marvel and held the solution to every problem.

In the arts, it was the time of such innovators as the Impressionists and Symbolists, but the artists who are known today as “Victorian” valued and perpetuated established academic methods and narrative subject matter. A few of the works on view are reproductions of larger or more famous works, such as the print in the dining room of Albert Bierstadt’s painting *The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak,* 1863, or the copy in the music room after Joseph Mallord William Turner’s *Shipping in the Bacino, Venice, with Santa Maria della Salute at the Entrance to the Grand Canal in the Distance,*  1840\. The prevalence of copies such as these signals particular aspirations and values held by many Victorians.

*Gilded: The Art of Heritage House* takes the viewer through these passions and achievements room by room. Every detail, from the ornate fireplaces to the china in the kitchen, reflects the Victorian desire for richness and Victorians’ wonder over all that the world had to offer. Even the question of what could be called art was hotly debated in this time when photography had just been invented and machines presented a new kind of aesthetic. The art one exhibited in one’s home reflected how one felt about these matters, where one had traveled, how well educated one was, who were in one’s social circle, and what the extent of their landholdings were. Every decorative detail had meaning.

Crack the Victorian code by visiting *Gilded: The Art of Heritage House* to find out what every lovely gilt-framed image might have meant to a Victorian. The Museum of Riverside is grateful to the City of Riverside for sustaining its historic sites and exhibitions such as *Gilded: The Art of Heritage House.*

*By Robyn G. Peterson, Museum Director*