Lyndhurst

Upstairs at Lyndhurst there is a picture gallery that still holds the paintings the railroad financier Jay Gould hung there. He bought this estate above the Hudson in 1880 as a country house, and within about a year he had filled the walls with French and European academic pictures, bought in New York from the dealers Goupil and Knoedler. Many are still in their original gilt frames. Among them is Premières caresses by William Bouguereau, the French Salon painter, a mother and child he showed at the Paris Salon of 1866.

The house is older than the collection. The architect Alexander Jackson Davis designed it in 1838 for William Paulding, a former mayor of New York, as a turreted Gothic Revival villa that critics soon nicknamed Paulding's Folly. A later owner, the merchant George Merritt, had Davis double its size and called it Lyndenhurst, after the linden trees planted on the grounds.

Gould's daughter Anna, Duchess of Talleyrand, was the last family owner, and in 1961 the estate passed to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which still runs it.