Made by Tiffany in 1874 and exhibited at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, the silver swan was a latecomer to the collection of Doris Duke. She bought it at auction in 1988, and was so fond of it that she kept it with her on her annual cycle of journeys to homes in Honolulu, Beverly Hills, Newport, New York, and New Jersey.

This and a second Oudry work of the same size that also hangs on the second floor landing at Rough Point were recently discovered to be preparatory sketches for paintings commissioned by Samuel Jacques Bernard, the comte de Coubert (1686-1753), for the dining room of his grand hôtel on the rue du Bac in Paris, built between 1740 and 1742. The full-scale paintings were removed in 1887 when the hôtel was dismantled and its decorations sold. They are now in the Museés des arts décoratifs, Strasbourg.

When Doris Duke bought this early Chinese jar in 1955, she expressed a shared passion with her parents for Asian ceramics, but at the same time signaled a departure from their narrowly focused interest in later eighteenth-century export ware. As a result, Rough Point is filled with a wonderful range of Chinese pottery from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

Doris Duke had a great fondness for antique ceramics and even went to the trouble of learning how to properly repair them. This piece probably appealed to her both for its complicated technique, known as fahua -- with an outer layer of turquoise blue openwork over a solid container -- and for its subject matter, the Eight Immortals of Chinese mythology celebrating the birthday of the god of longevity in the immortal land, depicted with pine trees and clouds over waves.

This marine scene from the Golden Age of Dutch painting was among the last works of art that Doris Duke added to the collection at Rough Point. She purchased it at auction in New York in 1985.