Look inside the Breakers, a 70-room, 138,300-square-foot mansion that belonged to one of America’s wealthiest Gilded Age families

In a nod to the Vanderbilts’ steamship and railroad business ventures, the cherub on the left held an anchor as a locomotive chugged past it. On the right, the other cherub held a sledgehammer and railroad spike.

“It’s really humorous to see classical cherubs celebrating the rise of an industrial empire,” architectural historian John Tschirch said in the audio tour. “But that’s what the Gilded Age was all about — combining the old imagery of the classical world with the technology of the new.”

The room was decorated with alabaster columns and Baccarat crystal chandeliers powered by electricity, a state-of-the-art technology during the Gilded Age.

Marble mosaics covered the entire floor and ceiling. The wrought-iron and bronze light fixture over the billiard table was so heavy it had to be attached to the structural beams of the Breakers in order to stay up.

On an episode of the HBO show “The Gilded Age,” Alderman Morris and George Russell played a round of billiards in this room after dinner.

In a technique called bookmatching, each piece of marble was cut in half to create two identical slabs for a uniform look throughout the room.

Conservators assumed that panels on the walls were decorated with silver leaf, but when they never seemed to tarnish, tests with a portable X-ray machine revealed that they were actually made of platinum, chief conservator of the Preservation Society of Newport County, Jeff Moore, said on the audio tour.

In the show, the wealthy Russell family hosted their daughter Gladys’ debut ball at their mansion. The Music Room at the Breakers stood in as the Russells’ ballroom.

The walls in the cabinets in the room were crafted from Circassian walnut imported from Russia and Turkey.

Rooms on the second floor featured simpler furnishings designed by interior decorator Ogden Codman.

A portrait of Gladys, who later became known as Countess Széchenyi, hung above her bed.

The bathroom next to Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s room featured a marble tub so thick that it had to be filled and emptied several times before it stayed warm enough. Carved from a single block of marble, the tub’s design emulated that of a Roman sarcophagus.

The phone connected to call buttons for butlers, housekeepers, and other staff members.

The room featured four Neoclassical panels representing the four seasons of the year.

The Breakers contained 33 bedrooms for its 40 staff members, accessible through a servant staircase.

The Breakers’ kitchen appeared as part of the Russells’ mansion in “The Gilded Age.”

The trees, which can grow up to 45 feet wide, served as a status symbol on large Gilded Age estates.

The Breakers mansion remains one of the finest examples of the extravagant displays of wealth that defined the Gilded Age. Walking through enormous rooms glittering with gold furnishings, painstaking mosaics, and painted ceilings, I felt as if I were touring a European palace — just as its millionaire owners intended.