Behind the Cover
How a Gilded Age socialite photographed in black and white at a party in 1883 became the cover star of our June 2023 issue.
This 1883 photo of Alva Vanderbilt by the photographer José María Mora is featured on the June 2023 cover of Rhode Island Monthly. (Photograph: Alamy)
The June 2023 issue of Rhode Island Monthly, now on newsstands, takes a deep dive into Gilded Age Newport, uncovering the scandalmongers, social-climbers and other colorful characters that made nineteenth century Newport an enclave for the nouveau riche.
On the cover is Alva Vanderbilt, one of Newport’s leading ladies and an undisputed star of her day. The photo was captured by Cuban-American photographer José María Mora on the occasion of the Vanderbilt Fancy Dress Ball, a must-attend event Alva hosted at her New York chateau. Some 1,200 guests attended the 1883 party dressed as everything from an Egyptian queen to a medieval knight to a cat (complete with a taxidermy cat for a hat. Yikes). Alva herself came dressed in a resplendent, floor-length gown in the style of a Venetian lady.
The photo, originally shot in black and white, was brought to life recently by Rhode Island Monthly imaging specialist Alan DiPetrillo, who used historical descriptions of the original dress to recreate it in color for the cover.
The original black and white photo by photographer José María Mora. (Photograph: Alamy)
The first challenge proved discovering the dress’s color. Unlike the electric light dress worn to the party by Alva’s sister-in-law, which survives in the Museum of the City of New York, Alva’s Venetian ensemble is lost to time. The only surviving photos of it are in black and white, leaving little in the way of visual clues. Instead, Rhode Island Monthly creative director Doreen Chisnell searched online for details about the dress. She found them in a description by journalist Frank Crowninshield originally published in a 1941 issue of Vogue:
“Mrs. Vanderbilt’s costume was inspired by Alexandre Cabanel’s painting of a Venetian princess,” writes Crowninshield. “Her dress was embellished with a light blue satin train, magnificently embroiled in gold and lined with Roman red. It likewise had an underskirt of white-and-yellow brocade, shading from the deepest orange to the lightest canary. On her head, she wore a Venetian cap from which there shone, among other jeweled miscellanea, a miniature peacock of many-colored gems. A covey of lifelike doves served her also as minor accessories.”
With that description in hand, DiPetrillo set about colorizing the photo. It was not the first time he added color to a historical photo for a Rhode Island Monthly cover. In 2020, he spent twenty-five hours colorizing a 1925 photo of three girls on the beach by hand for that year’s July issue. This time around, he was able to save some hours using Photoshop’s colorize filter. The tool automatically adds color to black and white photos, but has a habit of guessing the wrong hue, requiring DiPetrillo to go back in and correct certain sections.
The photo after DiPetrillo applied a colorizing filter on Photoshop. The colors are brought to life but are not accurate to descriptions of the original dress. (Photograph: Alamy)
“That got me in the ballpark,” he says.
The rest he completed by painstakingly tracing the lines of the dress by hand, including every pearl of the intricate bodice. The project, he says, took between six and eight hours to complete.
The photo with hand-traced color corrections to match the dress as described in historical accounts. (Photograph: Alamy)
With the photo in color, Chisnell turned to her database of fonts to design the cover lines on the front of the issue. A Victorian-style font in a metallic gold hue proved the perfect pairing to evoke images of Vanderbilts and antique party invitations.
“I love design history, so I love a challenge of making it feel like that era,” Chisnell says. “I wanted it to feel like the era, but still to feel contemporary. I wanted it to reflect the Gilded Age.”
Along with the cover photo, Rhode Island Monthly staff also tracked down countless historical photos to illustrate “The Real-Life Gilded Age of Newport,” including many maintained in the archives of local organizations. These include the Preservation Society of Newport County, Rhode Island Black Heritage Society, Newport Historical Society, International Tennis Hall of Fame, Herreshoff Marine Museum, Providence Public Library, Newport Polo and the family collection of Keith Stokes.
Other organizations that proved helpful in providing photos and information for the piece included the New York Public Library, Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum, National Museum of Polo and Hall of Fame, Library of Congress, Duke University and the LIFE Picture Collection.
To view the June cover feature, pick up a copy of Rhode Island Monthly or subscribe today.
The completed cover, with font selections by creative director Doreen Chisnell. (Photograph: Alamy)
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