Doris Duke purchased this pair of whimsical earthenware fruit baskets, which include lizards, frogs, and insects in their decoration, in 1960, and they have occupied a place of honor in the Dining Room ever since. Their colorful glazes complement so nicely the colors of the Flemish tapestries that they are seen against. The baskets were borrowed recently by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston for their exhibition, Della Robbia: Sculpting with Color in Renaissance Florence, which ran from August 9 to December 4, 2016. The exhibition label for the baskets is reprinted here:

"Baskets of fruit were produced in considerable quantity by the Della Robbia shops. These arrays of colorful and plentiful produce, gathered into wicker baskets represent the abundance of nature, but arguably outdo nature itself: while real fruits will ripen and spoil, these glazed terracotta fruits will endure forever. They relate to ancient painted images of the baskets of fruit which were prepared as gifts to welcome guests into one's home - signs of hospitality that will never fade. Their appeal was so lasting that later sculptors emulated the Della Robbias' designs, creating new versions like these."

Charles Oldfield Bowles (1785-1862) was the son of an amateur painter and musician Oldfield Bowles (1739-1810) of North Aston, Oxfordshire. This was the first of five John Hoppner paintings owned by James B. Duke. He purchased it in 1908 not long after his marriage in 1907 to Nanaline Holt Inman, a widower from Macon, Georgia, who had a son, Walker, of about the same age as the sitter when Hoppner captured his likeness.

Doris Duke bought two lots of Chinese wallpaper at auction in 1958 and 1959 and had them pieced together to create 20 panels that would fit the Music Room walls at Rough Point. This particular panel was put together from three widths of paper that once hung in Clyne Castle, an eighteenth-century Welsh country house near Swansea. It is likely the paper was removed when the house was given to Swansea University in the 1950s and converted to a dormitory.

This full-length portrait was among the original furnishings, paintings, and decorative arts purchased by James B. and Nanaline Duke for their new house at 1 East 78th Street as it neared completion in 1912, which was also the year that Doris Duke was born.