Sugar River
Estate

The House is Built

The original farmhouse is raised on this parcel of Newport land in 1790, in the earliest years of the new republic. For nearly a century it anchors a working New Hampshire farm along the banks of the Sugar River — until Newport's most famous son returns home to transform it.

Austin Corbin Returns to Newport

Austin Corbin (1827–1896) was one of the great Gilded Age figures of American life — founder of the Long Island Rail Road, developer of Manhattan Beach, pioneer banker who helped establish the national banking system. He hosted Theodore Roosevelt, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Rudyard Kipling, and the Prince of Wales at his Newport estate. His nearby 25,000-acre Corbin Park, stocked with 160 American bison, played a documented role in saving the species from extinction — a story told in Ken Burns' The American Buffalo.

In the late 1880s, Corbin returned to his Newport roots and began dramatically expanding the family estate — adding the grand great rooms, soaring two-story windows, the library with its massive granite fireplace, and the spacious studio room that anchors the rear of the house.

A French Dynasty Arrives

Austin Corbin's daughter Mary Corbin married René Chéronnet-Champollion of Paris in 1878 — grandson of Jean-François Champollion, the French philologist who in 1822 deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone, one of the most consequential intellectual achievements in history. The Champollion name had become synonymous with unlocking the ancient world. René and Mary settled in Newport and had one son, André, born in Paris in 1880. René died in Newport in 1886.

The Painter of Newport — André Chéronnet-Champollion

Orphaned young and raised by his grandfather Austin Corbin at this estate, André Chéronnet-Champollion grew up between Newport and New York. He graduated Harvard in 1902 and devoted himself entirely to painting — traveling India and Tibet to document its temples, priests, and sacred animals in vivid oil on canvas. Inspired by the war artist Vereshchagin, his work bridged the ethnographic and the artistic.

André married Adelaide Knox in 1908 and made this Newport estate his home and his studio. The grand double-height room with the wood stove was André's painting studio — its tall walls and generous north light ideal for large-format canvases.

His paintings are held at the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art, Harvard University's Peabody Museum, and the Newport Historical Society, which maintains a dedicated gallery of his oils. In 1915, André went to fight for France in World War I. He was killed in action on March 23, 1915 at Bois-le-Prête, aged 34 — the last of his Newport line. He is buried in France.