A private tour for four persons of Rough Point, conducted by Pieter N. Roos, Executive Director of the Newport Restoration Foundation.  A. Bruce MacLeish, Director of Collections, will then give a guided tour of this year’s special exhibit entitled “Zoo in the House: Animals in the Doris Duke Art Collection” on display in the museum galleries of Rough Point.  Miss Duke was known as an avid animal enthusiast (her most notable pets were two camels who summered at Rough Point!) and so it is not surprising that animals appear as a frequent theme in the artwork she collected. 

Rough Point is situated dramatically on the cliffs of Newport, Rhode Island, with expansive grounds designed by renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead – a spectacular setting in a city that is famous for its vistas.  But what lies outside Rough Point is surpassed by what lies within.  The collection accumulated by the Duke family sits undisturbed and exactly as it was when Doris Duke last left the house in 1992.  Few house museums can make that claim, and fewer yet can claim such distinguished collections.  Canvases by Gainsborough, van Dyck, and Renoir populate the house, at home among furniture and other decorative arts of equal caliber.   Rough Point is unique, not only in its collections, which represent some of the best of their kind in the United States, but also in allowing visitors to visit a Gilded Age estate whose owner is within living memory.