Many of the opulent mansions in the US were built during the country's "Gilded Age". Leading up to this period, the industrial revolution took place that made the businessmen who led it filthy rich. What did you do when you became so rich? You built homes and summer cottages and tried to outdo each other. The most famous examples of this can be seen in Newport, Rhode Island, but there are many other examples of it. Many of them have now become museums.
One such example is the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach. Henry Flagler was a founder of Standard Oil and later the Florida East Coast Railway, which made the Florida coast popular. The museum started out as a mansion known as Whitehall that finished completion in 1902 as a wedding present for his second wife. The house was saved from demolition in 1959 by Flagler's granddaughters, who converted it to a museum. We took a tour of the museum in February. This is the ceiling leading into the South Hall that shows some of grandeur of the period.